Bitcoin Forum

Hello all, I been a long time reader here but have only recently signed up.
I started mining bitcoin in 2015. I saved up and brought 2x second hand s3 antminers and a 1x s1 antminer, I was really interested in the blockchain tech and had to have a piece of the pie.
I mined just over 4btc which had been sitting in my blockchain.info wallet. One day I couldn't access my email due to wrong password, I finally got access back into my email and noticed a few emails had been deleted as well as the one which contained my wallet details, lucky I had a .txt backup. Urgently I log into my wallet and found I had been a robbed, all my btc was gone. My heart sunk, I feel so bummed all that work and money for nothing.

My advice is
Dont keep you wallet details in your email or online at all.
If you have bitcoin dont tell anyone
Use an offline or physical wallet

Dont make the same mistake as me  :(

Thanks for you sharing, wish more luck for you

Sorry to hear that you lost your coin.  Wallet security is very important, I suggest hardware wallets such as trezor or ledger.  They are pretty darn secure!  Otherwise assume that someone will be trying to hack your stuff.  oh, and also read up on making strong passwords.  It is very possible to make passwords for email and other accounts that are secure, hard to brute force, and easy to remember.

Good luck!

I feel sorry for you bud. At $16,000 usd per bitcoin today that is a real bummer. Maybe your a victim of a phishing website, they can steal your credentials and hacked you.

Thank you for advice. How about the private email just special to store wallet detail with no access as a normal email? Is it still dangerous?
I hope it will happen to anybody else.

First I would just like to say how I’m very sorry for your loss and thank you for the heads up and advice. THIs is clearly an illustration how even if we get successful on this as long as it is not on our hands it can get lost or disappeared.

Sorry to hear that... I was just like you, now I'm starting to care more about securing my bitcoins.. I Just got a hardware wallet after reading many terrible stories from users of online wallets.

If you must use online wallet (like such as say Block Chain) my advice would be:

1) Sign up with a brand new email address, tell NO ONE of this email address and never use it for anything other than correspondance to your online wallet provider.
2) Ensure both your online bitcoin wallet and email account has extremely long secure passwords
3) Enable 2 factor authentication to your phone and any additional secondary password for sending bitcoins from your online wallet. Again, ensuring that nothing ties your phone number to the email you used to sign up for your wallet by having a brand new one.
4) Keep any computer or mobile device you use to access it clean from malware and viruses, if unsure, dont use it.

Wow, sorry for your loss.  I keep my coins on my Ledger from www.gotcryptowallet.com/ so I hope to avoid what happened to you.  I'm keeping it and forgetting about it just like my retirement fund.

Sorry to hear about your losses, I can imagine losing BTC is painful. I agree that we shouldn’t store our BTC in online wallets for the long term. Get a hardware wallet, it is worth the investment. 

losing a bitcoin is like losing a treasure. I feel sorry for your loss. Im sorry.

Thankyou for the advice, I couldn't imagine losing that much btc. Please send me your wallet address as I would like to send you a small donation, it wont be much but at least it will get you started on your new btc journey

Thanks for sharing your advices with us and so sorry about your lost. Indeed, it's better NOT to save/share our important personal informations online (the lesser we share, the better we are)

PS: What you're going to do with your 2x second hand S3 antminers and 1x S1 antminer? Are you going to start mining Bitcoin again, or you're going to mine other alt coins?

Omg of course never email yourself wallet details. The only way that would make sense is if it was encrypted, which most people wouldn't have a clue how to do properly. Blockchain.info is notorious for terrible security too. I'm so sorry for your loss. This is awful.

This is heartbreaking, considering the value of 1 BTC right now. Not to mention the Time and Effort invested on it. I can only lament on your loss. To avoid this kind of scenario in the future, everyone should be vigilant enough. We, ourselves, are the only ones who could protect our own bitcoins because their safety are determined by our own safety practices.

it is really sad, you might never get back your bitcoin, we sorry about your lost, and we also learn morething about your experience.

I am also have been hacked one time.
If you using online wallet: create one dedicated email for him and set another password. Use old computer only for btc operations, and type site adress manually in adress bar dont search blockchain info on google

Around June/July I had a massive power surge which unfortunately damaged my miners. I currently have nothing but I think ill save up to buy another miner.

Losing our bitcoin is just normal, especially if we are just a newbie and we made a mistake about sending our bitcoin on a certain address that we didn't know accidentally, and what happened to you is like someone hacked your email, well, that happens a lot, I've also experienced that, luckily I've made my actions really quick on retrieving my email password because I know something is fishy, and it would be better if you are going to put 2FA security on your email.

Actually, my brother once told me that because he saw me that I'm putting all the details in my email and in other online thing as it's really too dangerous like you can't really tell when they'll attack you. So I deleted it and wrote in a paper, laminated it and keep it in a safe place.
I can't imagine how I'll handle my emotions if my btc will loss in a glimpse of my eye, maybe on one can talk to me or I'll have many sleepless nights
OP, sorry for your loss and hope you can start your journey again.

That's what experienced members are shouting for everyone who is holding their funds online. Even if someone is taking all the security precautions such as 2FA and other safety features, there is a risk of compromisation of the database on the server side.  Thus one should never maintain more than his 5% to 10% holdings on the web wallets or exchanges. Reputed hardware wallet or securely generated paper wallets along with backup is the best option in my opinion.

Sorry to hear this news of you.I always suggest people to use a offline hardware wallet.And keep their online wallet password/private key very safely so that they wouldn't face problem.And thanks for your advice

OP, sorry ti hear that and thanks for your sharing. Currently i still use my email to save my login data to many site. Now, after i hear from you about that i'll move all of that to offline. I'll write that on the paper to make sure all be safe. Once again, thank you very much for sharing your bad experience.

Oh no,it is very hard to digest because 4BTC is really big amount with the current value,but if we are having more than one bitcoins it is better to store it in a hardware wallet and never store your passwords or wallet details into mails or google drive even not in your system just keep it in a pen drive and keep it in a secured place.But don't worry you can make more bitcoins than you lost by working smartly,try to do trading with your mined bitcoins to get extra profit.And try to do altcoin trading which give good profit with less investment then you just but bitcoins with the profit from altcoin mining.

I recommend using a secure hardware wallet when you have a large amount of Bitcoins. Also a paper wallet but keep the private key in two separate and secure locations. For example a bank lock box.  You can rent them for a monthly fee in some banks.

I am very sorry the OP lost his money. I concurr that all those points are very important and I want to stress that number 4 is no less! People use their normal phone (a smartphone mostly these days) as a 2FA device. It is wrong! It is very easy to hack a smartphone. People lost their money from a 2FA protected online wallets, too, because of this.

The good practices are the following:
1) I know people who have a dedicated computer for their bank accounts and never use it to browse other web pages. This is a very good practice. Use it for BTC too
2) Also, you may want to buy a very cheap and simple phone and use it ONLY for 2FA just to be able to read text messages with a second factor passphrases. Remember, the simpler the phone, the harder it is to hack it!
3) Or, as the alternative, buy a hardware wallet, it can be used both to secure your bitcoins but it also features a 2FA device. A very secure 2FA, to be sure.

I recommend using a secure hardware wallet when you have a large a amount of Bitcoin

for me i only share my password to my wife if anything happen to me she can manage my account.

It was really unfortunate for you to lost that much bitcoin, this will be one the lesson learned for all of us using bitcoin.
I dont keep my private keys online or in my email, i always back them up offline and i put my bitcoin in an offline wallet for more security.

It is NEVER a good idea to store wallet data in online services or cloud storage. We have seen time and time again, how these services are hacked and how people lose their bitcoins. You have to remember one thing, these hackers cannot hack Bitcoin, so they focus all their attention and resources on the weakest link, which is third party service providers that use Bitcoin.

They get easy access to centralised services with poor development and code with a lot of exploits. Nobody has ever lost bitcoins, stored on paper wallets. ^smile^

thanks for your advice sir, but it's all back to each other, because the mistake is done by each person because I also
never experienced it ie lost bitcoin in my wallet online even though the amount is not as big as have master ,,

Sorry for your lost OP, that really was a huge amount now compared to the price when it was in 2015.  This is the first thing I learned about saving Bitcoin. There had been many warnings and alternatives than keeping our BTC in an online wallets.  So the first thing I did was download a light wallet and protect the address with a password.  I also set a back up of private keys just in case my HDD/SSD fails.  I hope that many member here will learn from your experience and thank you for sharing and giving us warning about this kind of stuff.

sorry, for your lost, we learn from losses.

don’t give upstart again and use hardware wallet.

you have experience and can start again.

thanks for sharing.

I have a friend who also lost his btc due to it was hack his wallet. A victim of phishing attack in his email that is why it is very important to be very careful in saving our details to not put or save it in an email. So sad to hear the story of others.

Yeah don't give up and start again because we know and you know that you have experienced about bitcoin. Mined again and make money/profit whule bitcoin doing a good job increasing it's value due to the demand that there's so many big man investing on it. I really really satisfied and good because i have a little amount of bitcoin holdings and it gives me huge profit even if it's just a little

Info is helpful before I run further!
Because now there are so many invisible thiev..

i have ever felt that. so bad.

This is purely your fault, your experience of being a valuable sharing for us always keep our financial data especially bitcoin in a safe place.
Email access is one of the most vulnerable data to hack or missing, it is not recommended to save the important things in it.
Regarding your case, bitcoin certainly can not be in reserve, because it is so independent that there will be no one party that can save your account and transaction, except your own.

It is one of the disadvantages of bit coin. If you have security issues and only a few numbers are leaked, you can not lose access to the link because you can lose everything you have.

Thanks for the advice

I want you to be careful not only of you but also of others who see this article. Suspicious links and addresses should not be accessed or shared.

Im sorry for your loss mate, and i hope your story might teach a thing or two to people who are new to the entire cryptocurrencies scene. Invest on your security, it's the best thing you can do in the age we're living in.

Good advice. Yes money is money. You have to keep it safe. Humans have been robbing humans since the beginning of time....sadly.

Because of that reason - better use cold wallet as Ledger Nano S.
Didn`t you use SMS verifcation in your blockchain.info?

I have never experienced it before, but I know it's missing something valuable so your advice is very good and I will try to always remember it, thank you ..

Rather than private key, I believe a second level protection should be implemented in bitcoin wallets. Maybe wallets can be tied to user's cell phone. So in the event of a loss of wallet key, it can be protected using cell phone.

Recently someone has tried to steal my xbox outlook account. However, I have received a warning says go ahead and replace your password.

Bitcoin could be better in terms of security, if it allows us to replace private key when it is really needed.

It's hard to swallow this because BTC is pretty expensive now, 2 BTC can even buy cars and real states this days, by the way this must be a lesson for all of us. TBH I don't really trust online back ups because I always felt unsecure not because some else's know my password and email (not because of that), but because I think something higher are controlling all of the information in the surface web, remember what Snowden have leaked?

Write it down on paper bro and keep it on your own secret vault in your own room. And yes listen to their advice, hardware wallets are always the safest (and keep your wallet in a safe place). You're a miner and I know you know a lot of stuffs (hardware and software but never ever forget that even if you are busy working always safety your treasure first.

You're just going to cause a heartache to yourself when you lost what you are working so hard. :-\

I feel sad if you lose bitcoin, because it's hard for me to get bitcoi. my advice is better you save bitcoin in your wallet to make it more secure than the hackers who will steal the bitcoin that belongs to you.
 

Thank you for sharing your valuable information

Terribly sorry to hear of your loss, and thank you for being generous enough to warn us not to keep wallet details in email etc. I wish more blessings come your way now and in the future...

I would eve suggest you to not to keep your password anywhere accept of your head. Any PC can be broked and you will lose your BTC

Thank you for the advice and I am really sorry for what happened to you.

I may add some measures you can take to keep your wallet safe:
-It is better to use a hardware wallet and keep it  in a safe place.
-When using an online wallet use a strong password and activate the 2FA.
-Only access your wallet from a device you trust.
-Backup your wallet and encrypt it.
-Always update your softwares.

It sure feels terrible to loose just a little fraction of it today because it's become extremely valuable and so i will suggest you  to get a hardware wallet like Trezor so that you have your bitcoins saved intact without any hustle with passwords like with many online wallets.

I also read about creating strong passwords It is possible to create passwords for emails and other accounts that are safe, difficult to spot, and easy....