How This Bitcoin Veteran Lost Nearly $1 Million in BTC After a Decade of HODLing

A long-time bitcoin investor and his father found out last week that ~25 BTC ($919,000) that the family had held in a private wallet since 2012 had been stolen in September.

The online Bitcoin community is now coming to the rescue, offering a 23 BTC bonus to anyone who can recover the victim's money.

Unsecured private keys

In a video from X user @RMessit (aka Rick) on Saturday, the victim said his Bitcoin wallet's private key was stored in a self-hosted password manager called Keypass.

The KeyPass vault can only be opened with another password known only to the two people. However, this password only contains 30 bits – much smaller and less secure than the standard Bitcoin private key itself, which is 256 bits.

Still not sure how the private keys were found, Rick suspects that someone may have watched them enter their device's KeyPass password. Verify that the device on which the private key is stored is connected to the Internet.

Rick added, “I'm writing this especially since it's our first father/son trip to El Salvador, so it's gut-wrenching.” In the year

Rick encouraged Bitcoin users to buy a regular hardware wallet to “maintain their cold storage space.” Modern hardware wallets allow Bitcoin users to securely store and send coins without exposing their private keys to the Internet, thereby protecting them from online hackers.

In 2012, hardware wallets didn't exist, and neither did genealogies – human-readable lists of 12 to 24 words that store personal key information in a brain-unforgettable fashion.

Tracking coins

Fellow Bitcoiners are already making progress in tracking down the thief. One user, @coinableS, noticed that the hacker was reusing his Bitcoin addresses and that his attempts to mix the coins were relatively weak.

CoinableS also noted that the hacker withdrew coins from Binance's hot wallet to one of his addresses after the hack occurred. Because Binance follows know-your-customer practices, Rick asked the exchange and its founder, Changpeng Zhao, to help identify whose address it was.

If returned, the victim has no interest in keeping the BTC. He suggested that he keep only 1 BTC for himself, send another 1 BTC to charitable causes and keep the rest for the hunter.

“I would have enjoyed earning even 1 BTC so I think it makes perfect sense.” “Also, I want the bounty to be as large as possible so that we have a big incentive for someone to go after these bastards.”