‘I forgot my PIN’: An epic tale of losing $30,000 in bitcoin

Then from the backseat I hear my daughter say, “What’s a Bitcoin?”

Later

You know what I bet? I bet the PIN check is literally a string comparison, between the input PIN, and a stored "correct" PIN that they decrypt every time you try a PIN.

> If you do what is called a “soft reset” on the device—accomplished by delicately shorting two pins on its printed circuit board—you can then install the exploit firmware without wiping the SRAM’s memory. This allows you to see your PIN and seed numbers.

There's the primary vulnerability.

I fear there are other vulnerabilities that could defeat the anti-PIN cracking delays...

Old-school pay-tv hackers (Chris Tarnovsky anyone?) would probably have a field-day with micro-probers and more invasive recovery techniques on these hardware wallets. At $100 and in small volumes (plus the cost of flashy UIs and marketing), who knows how secure the silicon is.

The more I think about it, the more I think PIN-enabled wallets are the wrong way to go for long-term storage. Print your recovery words, store them appropriately (not all with one person and/or in one place, etc.) and then crush the generation device. Hopefully its random numbers can't be predicted.

A big folder with emergency/in case of death information (including Bitcoin recovery codes, but also, oh maybe banking information, which insurance companies you‘ve used, a will, medical directives etc., would have been a better idea.

And then put it where you keep big folders and people will actually find it when they‘re looking for it while in distress.

„My father died, he has this shelve with document folders, but let‘s ignore that and search my room“ said nobody ever.

This is going to be a deal-breaker for most people. For mass adoption, you'll need bitcoins to be held by institutions that take responsibility for screwups like lost keys (ie, banks).