What’s the closest you’ve ever come to losing your Bitcoin forever?

In 2013 a guy in Newport threw out a hard drive with thousands of coins on it, and he has spent over a decade fighting for permission to dig up a landfill. Another guy has 7,002 BTC sitting on an IronKey with two password guesses left. Those are the famous ones. The rest of us just have quieter versions of the same story.

Another hardware wallet advisory hit the front page this morning, which is what got me thinking about it.

The dead laptop nobody backed up. The “temporary” wallet that stayed temporary for three years. The seed written down at 2am with two words in the wrong order. The drive that vanished during a move and turned up in a box of cables six months later.

So let’s hear them:

– What happened?

– How long did you think it was gone?

– Did you get it back, and what finally worked?

– What did you change afterwards?

No judgement here. Most of us learned self custody the expensive way. Keep it general though, and please don’t post anything that describes your current setup.