Bitcoin Forum

But after hours of trying to remember the passphrase I used, it was a big FAT FAIL. Devastated...

That's when I remembered creating a backup paper wallet out of curiosity two months ago. It was thrown in the shredder pile, waiting to be shredded. I pulled the paper wallet out from the bottom of the pile and ran to my computer to enter in the root key.

I created the paper wallet way before I ever received any BTC, so I had lots of new receiver addresses that received BTC long after the paper wallet was made. What surprised me is that both old and new generated public/private addresses are recoverable regardless of when the backup is made since the addresses are created based on a seed for that particular wallet. And the paper backup recovers just the wallet, not the public/private keys directly. Very cool.

Armory scanned the transaction database and recovered all my addresses and BTC. OMFG.

Now I know the importance of keeping paper wallets and a lot more about how they work. I got lucky, though. I know it was pretty dumb of me to throw away my paper wallet like it was nothing, but I honestly didn't know how it worked exactly or that I'd need it later. Anyone else experience something similar?

not me, i memorized my seed/brain wallet, in addition to having a fairly long PW .. it's crazy to put a superlong password that you probably won't remember days or weeks later.