The student who sold his Toyota (2\2)

Previous chapter

If you haven't read the first chapter, you can do it here.

I ended it by telling you that before relocating from Israel, I downloaded the wallet to a desktop, disconnected it from the web, and stored it in a warehouse.

Opened my Wallet on Jan 2013

At that time the first cold wallet had not been invented yet, so this was the best & safest option to stay off the grid.

When I bought P2P in 2013 some BTC for the first time, I opened an account on blockchain.info (today known as blockchain.com) to which the seller transferred the coins. A few months afterward I sold my appliances for some more BTC (lesson - never be impatient with your long-term investments) and asked the coins to be sent to the same wallet.

My first Bitcoin purchase on 2013

I then downloaded a JSON file of the wallet backup and saved it on my "cold wallet" (see previous article), locked it in a safe warehouse, and departed to find land to buy & build a home & a business on it.

During all those years in LATAM, while making business & investments, I NEVER TRIED TO ENTER OR COMMUNICATE with my wallet.

I would have had to cross the ocean to recover my JSON backup file if I wanted to.

I also ignored all the phishing attempts that my mail received over the years. One can only wonder who from Blockchain.com shared with those scammers my mail.

Never responded to all those different phishing attempts

Fast forward

When the 2020 bull run sent BTC to peak around 60K, I remet with my "cold wallet" and decided it was time to advance.

Once I loaded my wallet backup file, things started to get complicated - It did not let me in, though my password was right.

The UI asked me for my MFA number or seed phrases, but when I opened the wallet back in 2013 - those technologies were not even used yet.

I wrote the wallet's customer service who responded:

The funds were lost

After a few weeks of back & forth with them, I realized that even though I did not lose my password - I might have lost the ability to enter my wallet, which by that time was worth already a nice retirement.

The system & security upgrades that blockchain.com ran occasionally, did not apply to my "veteran" wallet. As a result, the added security layers were not given to my wallet, but the login based on password alone was also deprecated.

I understood that to save my investment from being lost forever - drastic measures should be taken.

Trezor transactions on the blockchain

Never say never

I spotted one of the top crypto white hat hackers out there and rented their services to break into my lost wallet.

It took a few months, and a nice success fee, but one morning the hacker called me and announced he'd just managed to brute-force crack it - and he's in, seeing the funds, intact!

He was also honest enough to tell me about the BCH coins that also appeared in the wallet, as a result of the hard fork the BTC network underwent in 2017.

I quickly organized a cold wallet to receive the funds sent by the hacker from my cracked blockchain.info wallet.

I've invested in more than 15 altcoins. Here are few

Those are lying there, as part of my strategy is to not touch those before BTC goes far above 100K.

What I did instead was start to diversify my portfolio by entering into altcoins.

I did it by converting the BCH, BSV, BCHA & BTG coins that were airdropped from the different forks.

Which Altcoins did I invest in & what was my strategy?

Will cover it in the next post.

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