$100,000 In BTC Lost After A Bitcoiner Bungles A Wallet Transfer

Alas, as time goes on, more and more Bitcoin gets removed from the system. Unlike burning money, which happens to many altcoins, Bitcoin’s supply typically gets reduced out of negligence.

One Redditor experienced that first hand recently, giving out a warning to all Hodlers who are overconfident to not lose their crypto wallet password through lack of caution.

Onnar Pays The Price For Negligence

This bitcoiner, going by the username of Onnar, had recently posted on Reddit that he had lost his access to 2.6 Bitcoin. Crunching the numbers at the time of writing, this equates to around $96 802,42 in value lost forever. Onnar had transferred his wallet to a new computer over the holidays, promptly formatting his old system’s drive. Thing is, Onnar forgot to double-check whether or not his password manager contained the passwords he needed to access his private keys.

Onnar explained that he spent the next thirty minutes checking and re-checking his password manager for his BTC password, but there wasn’t one on his new PC at all. Thus, his assets are now frozen with no hope of cracking that code.

Onnar had admitted that the entire situation was his fault, as he didn’t confirm whether or not the file could be decrypted prior to wiping the old system. In his speculation, Onnar figured that the password manager did copy the password, but failed to automatically save it, which cost him 2.6 BTC.

Always Double Check And Keep Redundant Copies

From there, Onnar went around and spent a week and a half, just looking through his remaining notes and disk files, hoping that the password would be somewhere amongst them. Alas, the man wasn’t that lucky.

Reddit’s crypto community responded to Onnar’s plight with sympathy and advice. Several Redditors highlighted their own follies in the crypto space, one user, in particular, highlighting how he had done something similar, though he lost a smaller coin holding as a result.

As for advice, a user urged Onnar to do the “standard practice” when it comes to wallets: Use a hardware wallet, and proceed to write down the seed on two separate mediums: Paper and a metal plate. It seems that the consensus is to keep the seed words well away from being stored in a computer file, though it’s far more vulnerable there, to begin with.

An Unfortunate Trend In Crypto

Sadly, due to the relative complexity that is owning your personal wallet, these sorts of mistakes are quite common. One of the most famous incidents of this is none other than Peter Schiff, the infamous crypto naysayer that’s a prominent gold bug in his own right, lost access to his crypto holdings. This happened when the man managed to bungle his password and his pin, confusing the one for the other.