My bitcoin 2017 nightmare

[TheFlyingBird]

This is my first post since I registered. I want to share my story with bitcoins ending in Dec 2017.

It was back in 2012 when I first heard from Bitcoin. At first I started some mining but figured, buying some coins would be the easier way. I did so and sent the coins to my Bitcoin Core wallet. I let the computer sync every 2 or 3 months and meanwhile developed a module which would allow to integrate Bitcoin as payment method into my online store.

While the technical implementation was straight forward, the ability to use Bitcoin as payments was rather difficult. The volatility was high and it turned out that selling products against BItcoins could result in losses due to possible price drops and the time required to the cash coins out. I decided to not put the module into production.

So at some point I forgot about my bitcoins. It might have been in 2015.

- to be continued -

[TheFlyingBird]

We jump to early 2017 when I remembered my old computer having the Bitcoin Core installed. I started the machine and let it sync. I degraded CPU usage in order to avoid overheating. I don’t recall exactly how much time it took me to fully sync. It was rather weeks than days.

In August 2017 I met a fried for lunch who was quite involved in Bitcoin and blockchain technology. I told him about my problems with Bitcoin Core and that eventually the disk would run full. He gave me the advice to move the Bitcoins into a hardware wallet for security reasons but also for easier handling without the need of time consuming Core wallet sync. I put this on to my to-do-list. But things developed bad beginning end of August 2017.

[TheFlyingBird]

By one night end of August I was brought to hospital by emergency services due to health problems. The reason for my problems wasn’t determined so I was sent back home by the next day. However I had to reduce work. By end of September I had to suspend all work. By mid of November 2017 I was sent to hospital again. At the time, I had no imagination on how long it would take me to recover and how many times I had to fight back my tears.

[TheFlyingBird]

In hospital I read a lot between my therapy hours. Mostly books but also all the newspapers I could grab there. A news report mentioning Bitcoin draw my attention. It was about the start of Bitcoin – Futures to be traded by mid of December 2017 at some us exchanges. I called my wife in an  evening of late November and told her to go to the office, grab the one computer which was running the Bitcoin Core, bring it home, attach it to the network and let it fully sync. My plan was to be prepared to sell all Bitcoins by mid of December if things would go as I assumed they would.

Besides reading and my therapies I spent a lot of time in walking. I noticed that walking became became a bigger issue from day to day. But I wouldn’t not know how much it affected me until the next days and would send my into another struggle.

[TheFlyingBird]

By December 8th my wife called me and let me know the wallet was fully synced. I told her to send one Bitcoin to one of two exchanges where I had held accounts with. One Bitcoin only for safety reasons until this coin would show up on the exchange. I also told her to double check the receiving address twice. I have to mention that my wife knew about some Bitcoins I held but she didn’t know anything more.

By December 9th evening my wife called me again. She was crying and almost unable to speak. She said that she had been hacked. All Bitcoins were gone she said, except the one she send to the exchange. Since it was impossible to continue conversation we agreed to make a call on the next evening. I was shocked, confused and frustrated all at the same time. How could this happen? I had put all security measures into place I could think of – except of moving funds to a hardware wallet. The task I couln't finish before I was sent to recovery.

[ikilledcobain]

Interesting story - how many did you end up losing?

If it makes you feel any better, I got scammed out of 20btc around 2012. The important thing is to not let it keep you from doing well in the space now. Still plenty of opportunity available.

[TheFlyingBird]

@Ikilledcobain – stay tuned and read until the end.

Later on I fell into a fitful sleep. At little past 3am I woke up and felt deteriorated. I went to the restroom but could fairly hold myself sitting on the toilet. It was only when I washed my hands to see my face in the mirror. I had blood running down from a wound next to my right eye. I pushed the red button to call the night nurse in order help. I couldn’t remember anything on how I hurt myself but I surely knew by then that it had to do with my imbalanced walking. The whole mess was cleaned up by the nurse and I settled back into my bed but could hardly fall asleep.

[TheFlyingBird]

Dec 10th morning I was sent to stitch the wound. After this was done I send a short text message to my fried asking for help. He was on holiday and hadn’t much time. But he replied I should look out for return addresses and check if Bitcoins are sent back to these new addresses. Eventually I could also send him my public key but he wouldn’t be able to respond quickly.

I only had my old mobile phone with me and a rather bad cellular connection. So I tried to figure out how to find out more on this return addresses and trace the transactions on block explorer. It was painstaking task with as little as I had to perform it.

By the same day evening my wife told me the bad story at home. While Bitcoin Core was running Windows shut down unexpectedly. She was convinced someone had hacked the computer. While asking more details it turned out that it was Windows itself shutting down due to updates. And It went very bad because the disk run full. One more time I remembered my unfinished task of moving funds according to my friend’s advice from August.

[TheFlyingBird]

After we were able to reboot windows into safe mode and subsequently free up some space in order to let the Windows update finish successfully. However some part of the Bitcoin Core blockchain data got lost or corrupted and the Core started syncing from the very beginning. That was the reason the balance showed Zero.

It was obvious to me that it would take weeks to complete the full re-sync. However I found some Bitcoin Core command allowing to show and dump addresses from the command line the night before. I send these commands as email to my wife so she could only copy & paste it into the wallets debug window.

But eventually our efforts were paying out. We got 3 addresses dumped out. I told my wife to install a light wallet onto a separate computer. But beforehand she had to download a tool to calculate the hash for this wallet. It wasn’t quite straight forward since my wife had never used a command line or similar tools. However by the early morning hours of December 11th the wallet was installed successfully. Even though I had problems with concentrating myself I wanted to finish the task of importing the private keys into the new wallet and check the balances.

[marydale]

So what happened next?
Your story made me sit with a coffee in my hand reading it to the end, at least to the last fragment you uploaded.
Losing 20btc would be a nightmare I agree and I greatly respect ikilledcobain for preserving a positive prospect in life.
Sooo, will await the other fragments of the story TheFlyingBird. Interesting story

Interesting story - how many did you end up losing?

If it makes you feel any better, I got scammed out of 20btc around 2012. The important thing is to not let it keep you from doing well in the space now. Still plenty of opportunity available.

[TheFlyingBird]

One after one my wife copied the private keys into the new wallet and Bitcoin balance increased by every key from Zero to the figure expected. We both regained hope. By the same night my wife sent one more coin to an exchange and checked the balance there. As it worked, she then send more coins and asked my how to place orders. I told her in short how much I could remember myself. I never had sold any coins before so it was quite new to me either.

When my wife opened the order book she couldn’t understand the pricing information. As it turned out, she was in the meaning of Bitcoins prices would still be in the some hundred price range. I told her this wasn’t the case anymore since quite some time. So she placed a first order which with a price limit. However, due to trade limitations she could not place one Bitcoin at once but she had it to do in chunks.

Beginning Dec 12th we then subsequently sold Bitcoins in rather smaller chunks. By Dec 13th approximately a third of the initial balance was sold. It was Dec 14th when some calls to my mobile phone went undetected until evening. They calls came from my banks’ relationship manager. Unfortunately it was too late to call back. I made a notice to call him back the next day. But I already had a guess what might let to concerns.

[Tony_Nguyen]

This is my first post since I registered. I want to share my story with bitcoins ending in Dec 2017.

It was back in 2012 when I first heard from Bitcoin. At first I started some mining but figured, buying some coins would be the easier way. I did so and sent the coins to my Bitcoin Core wallet. I let the computer sync every 2 or 3 months and meanwhile developed a module which would allow to integrate Bitcoin as payment method into my online store.

While the technical implementation was straight forward, the ability to use Bitcoin as payments was rather difficult. The volatility was high and it turned out that selling products against BItcoins could result in losses due to possible price drops and the time required to the cash coins out. I decided to not put the module into production.

So at some point I forgot about my bitcoins. It might have been in 2015.

- to be continued -

I have heard about btc since 2011 but did not buy any of those. Then I decided to start investing in btc since last September and it has not put me down at anytime. Very happy to invest in it.

[TheFlyingBird]

One after one my wife copied the private keys into the new wallet and Bitcoin balance increased by every key from Zero to the figure expected. We both regained hope. By the same night my wife sent one more coin to an exchange and checked the balance there. As it worked, she then send more coins and asked my how to place orders. I told her in short how much I could remember myself. I never had sold any coins before so it was quite new to me either.

So my wife placed a first order which with a price limit. However, due to trade limitations she could not place one Bitcoin at once but she had it to do in chunks.
Beginning Dec 12th we then subsequently sold Bitcoins in rather smaller chunks. By Dec 13th approximately a third of the initial balance was already sold and the exchange accounts were upgraded to higher daily volumes.

It was Dec 14th when some calls to my mobile phone went undetected until evening. They calls came from my banks’ relationship manager. Unfortunately it was too late to call back. I made a notice to call him back the next day. But I already had a guess what might let him to be concerned.

[Reid]

Okay that was the same as the last one.
Oh please get faster in typing. I got so excited that I want to know the ending to this lovely story.
Maybe I just read it too fast. 
I hope it is a good ending too. Something like "we live happily ever after".

[TheFlyingBird]

The next day the relationship manager told me that he was alerted by a number of bankwire transactions and thereof also of the increased account balance. He asked for details. I told in short that I owned Bitcoins from quite early days. He asked for documents which would allow proving this in order to avoid blocking the account. I told about my hospitalisation but also of screenshots I had made in the early days and also of being able to show transaction logs from the exchanges. However all this details were inaccessible to me at the moment.

The outcome was to block a certain amount on the account would be blocked but no incoming payments would be affected. I could live with that decision.

Between Dec 12 and Dec 20 we sold all our Bitcoins as well as Bitcoin Cash expect for little amounts. By January 2018 I was sent back home from hospital. I shifted some cash back into IOTA and ETH but I don’t care much of market situation. I have regained some thrust on myself and I am re-learning walking. I can manage to walk 200 meters with no help but I am still in therapy to solve this. Funds on the bank account have been unblocked. It will still require some time to fully recover. While I had lost my salary, the 2017 sales give my confidence to have enough time to overcome all difficulties.

[Xester]

Well probably you are very rich right now.  Considering that you have known bitcoin that early and already bought bitcoin when its price was still low.  I wished that I was you and likewise bought sane amount of bitcoin.  I might not be thinking anymore about finances right now.  Anyways, I am hoping to see your next post.

[santino11]

By December 8th my wife called me and let me know the wallet was fully synced. I told her to send one Bitcoin to one of two exchanges where I had held accounts with. One Bitcoin only for safety reasons until this coin would show up on the exchange. I also told her to double check the receiving address twice. I have to mention that my wife knew about some Bitcoins I held but she didn’t know anything more.

By December 9th evening my wife called me again. She was crying and almost unable to speak. She said that she had been hacked. All Bitcoins were gone she said, except the one she send to the exchange. Since it was impossible to continue conversation we agreed to make a call on the next evening. I was shocked, confused and frustrated all at the same time. How could this happen? I had put all security measures into place I could think of – except of moving funds to a hardware wallet. The task I couln't finish before I was sent to recovery.

This is the most shocking news you could ever have in the middle of your recovery and also in the middle of December when bitcoin is really huge.
A lightning strike in a place only once, and i hope you could have the same and will never be hacked again. i feel sorry for this, hope you can recover.

[imjustagirl]

Such an interesting story. Good luck to you! It's great that you were able to recover your funds. BitcoinCore is a pain, they should really implement some fast sync options, downloading the whole thing from zero bytes is always a pain, and that zero balance showing up until full sync is also scary.

[damrianto]

my nightmare that occurred in 2017 is very impressive because the results of my campaign with nousplatform has not produced results, what happened with them I made a nightmare that occurred in 2017.
and now this year 2018 i hope the price in kypto market can satisfy ...

[tyuner4]

Very interesting story and I am happy that you are not scammed of the bitcoin and able to recover it by syncing. I hope the bitcoin can help you with your medical bills. Take care and get well soon.