Dodged a bullet: didn't have my wallet swiped from a Linode VPS

Sometime back I don't know how long ago, I set up bitcoind on a VPS I had at Slicehost. I figured I had CPU time available that I wasn't using, so why not? I got lucky, generated a block, and scored 50 BTC. It took me a while to figure out this had happened...think it was back around March 2011. A couple months later, I migrated my VPS to Linode.

Skip forward a few months...Linode's web interface allows someone to make off with some wallet files with keys to a fair number of bitcoins. I didn't think much of it at the time...didn't have bitcoind running.

Skip forward to a couple weeks ago...decided to take another look at all of this Bitcoin stuff. With a wallet worth somewhere around $500 if it's intact, I figured I'd have money for some toys, at least. After some trial and error, it appears that I'm not one of the eight Linode customers whose wallets were hijacked. Yay me. :-)

I've moved the wallet file off of Linode to a Linux box at home. I've figured out which addresses have my coins. Blockchain.info has the addresses so I can see what I have, but the private keys live on paper wallets (PDFs of which are on a flash stick on my keychain). I think I've gotten a better grip on how Bitcoin works and how to do things reasonably securely.

I guess that's long-winded for an intro, but it is what it is. :-)