Lost $30,000 worth of Bitcoin, and miraculously found it back six months later

January 4, 2016: 7.4 BTC = $3,000

In January 2016, I spent $3,000 to buy 7.4 bitcoins. I thought it was worth it. At that time, I was the director of the Blockchain Future Lab, and I wanted to start by experiencing Bitcoin myself. I didn't know that this transaction would bring me so much trouble.

My Bitcoin experiments have been interesting, and it’s very easy to buy things using this cryptocurrency. I bought Starbucks through the airBitz app. I bought a wireless security doorbell (with camera) on Amazon using Purse.io. I also bought graphic novels at a comic book store in Los Angeles using Bitcoin.

By November 2016, the price of Bitcoin had almost doubled, and it was growing almost every day. The Bitcoins I bought randomly started to turn into some real money. For a while, I kept my Bitcoin private keys in an online wallet, but I wanted to move them to a safer place. Many online wallet services keep their customers' Bitcoin private keys, which means that the accounts of these online wallet users are extremely vulnerable to hackers, scammers (remember the Mt. Gox incident in 2014 where 850,000 customers' Bitcoins were lost?) or governments (such as the BTC-e exchange that was hit by the US government in August).

I consulted some Bitcoin experts, and they all told me that the safest way to protect Bitcoin is to use a "hardware wallet." This small device, essentially a USB stick, stores your private keys, allowing you to authorize transactions without exposing them to the internet. I chose a hardware wallet called Trezor (which means "safe" in Czech), and on November 22, I bought a Trezor hardware wallet on Amazon for $100 (also through Purse.io).

After the wallet arrived, I plugged it into my computer and visited the Trezor website to go through the steps to set it up. The little device has a monochrome screen that opens to reveal a padlock-like icon. Following the instructions on the Trezor website, I wrote down 24 random words that the wallet generated. These included words like "aware," "move," "fashion," and "bitter." I wrote them down on a piece of orange paper. Next, I was prompted to create a PIN. I wrote that down (I chose some numbers that I was familiar with and easy to remember) on the same piece of paper.

The Trezor website explains that these 24 words are my recovery phrase, and they can be used to generate my Bitcoin private key. If I lose my Trezor wallet, or it stops working, I can enter these 24 words into a new Trezor wallet, or other hardware or online wallet that uses the same key generation algorithm. That said, it is very important to keep this piece of paper safe because anyone can use it to steal my 7.4 Bitcoins. I transferred my Bitcoin from the online wallet to the Trezor wallet, and then put the wallet and the yellow paper with the recovery phrase in a desk drawer in my home office. My plan is to put them in a safer place. After the holidays, I will do this.

Error: March 16, 2017: 7.4 BTC = 8799 USD

It was 6:30 in the morning. My 14-year-old daughter, Jane, was still studying in London, and my older daughter, Sarina, was attending college in Colorado. My wife, Carla, and I were leaving for the airport before heading to Tokyo for vacation. Looking for a phone charger, I rummaged through my desk drawer and saw my recovery phrase and PIN. What should I do? I thought, if anything goes wrong with my flight, I want my daughter to have access to these bitcoins. Since I bought them, their value has nearly tripled, and I believe they could be worth $50,000 someday. I picked up a pen and wrote on a piece of paper:

"Jane, if anything happens, give this paper to Cory. He'll know what to do with it. Love, Dad."

(“Cory” is my friend, Cory Doctorow, who is also my business partner at Boing Boing. He is not a Bitcoin enthusiast, but I know that he can generate Bitcoin private keys using these mnemonics.)

I put the paper in Jane's bedroom, under her pillow, and then went to the airport.

Junk: 7.4 BTC = 8,384 USD on April 4, 2017

We returned from Tokyo on March 24, and I didn't think about the orange paper until April 4, when I remembered that I had put it under Jane's pillow. How funny, I thought. She hadn't talked to me about it in the past week.

I went into her room and looked through her pillows. Nothing was there, so I looked under her bed and dragged out the piggy bank, using my phone as a light to better search.

"Carla?" I asked. "Did you see my orange piece of paper with the Bitcoin code on it? I searched Jane's room and didn't see it."

“Maybe Jane put it in her desk,” she said. Jane was at school, but I texted her to ask about it anyway. She said she hadn’t seen the yellow paper.

"Wait," Carla said, "the cleaning staff cleaned the house when we left. Let me contact them."

Carla called the cleaning service we usually use and got in touch with the aunt who cleaned the room that day. She told Carla that she did remember seeing the orange paper.

"Where is it?" Carla asked.

"I threw it away."

I knew the trash had been collected, but I put on a pair of gloves and looked through the trash and recycling bins. But aside from egg cartons, espresso grinds, and Amazon boxes, I saw no orange paper. Maybe it was in a landfill in Los Angeles.

Carla asked me if losing the paper was a big deal.

“Not really,” I said. “It’s just a hassle, that’s all. I need to transfer all the bitcoins from my Trezor wallet to an online wallet, then reset the Trezor, generate a new wordlist, and transfer the bitcoins back. If I don’t remember my PIN, that’s bad. But I do remember it. It’s supposed to be 551445.”

Forgotten: April 4, 2017: 7.4 BTC = $8,384

I plugged my Trezor wallet into my laptop and entered 551445.

The entered PIN is incorrect.

I must have made a mistake when entering my PIN, I thought. I tried 551445 again, and this time I made sure every digit was entered correctly.

The entered PIN is incorrect.

Oh no. I changed the number slightly: 554445

The entered PIN is incorrect.

This is ridiculous, I thought. I know the PIN, I've entered it at least a dozen times in recent months (without looking at the paper). Okay, maybe 554145.

The entered PIN is incorrect.

I saw a countdown timer on my Bitcoin wallet's monochrome display. It told me I had to wait a few seconds before I could try again, and my heart began to pound. I found the website of the Trezor wallet's manufacturer and read about the PIN delay, and then I saw the bad news: Every time I entered the wrong PIN, the delay doubled. "The PIN number is not stored in Trezor's memory," the website said. "This means that if the PIN is entered incorrectly, the wait time is not reset to zero. It would take a thief a lifetime to crack the PIN. That means you have plenty of time to transfer your funds from your paper wallet backup to a new device or wallet."

The problem was that I was the thief trying to move my bitcoins. I felt sick. After trying the PIN code six times without success, a feeling of fear spread through my body. I could even hear my heartbeat. I was worried that those 7.4 bitcoins might be gone forever.

I made a few guesses, but each time I failed, the PIN delay had reached 2048 seconds (or about 34 minutes). I opened my desktop calculator and quickly calculated that if I guessed wrong 31 times, I would probably be dead (in 34 years). Guessing wrong 100 times would mean waiting for more than 8*10^37 years.

I shared the news with Carla, telling her that I couldn't remember my password and that I was being punished every time I entered a wrong PIN. She asked me if I had saved my PIN in 1Password (a secure password app). I told her that I hadn't. When she asked me why, I didn't answer.

I knew, in my excited state, that it would be a mistake to waste precious guesses. My mind was corroded by the jumble of PIN numbers. I ran into the kitchen to prepare a curry dinner, but I was not thinking about anything else at the time. I cut potatoes into pieces, and in my mind, I imagined them as numbers on a Scrabble board. After a while, a number popped into my mind: 55144545. That's it! I walked out of the kitchen and ran excitedly to the office. The Trezor timer showed that I had to wait for a few hundred seconds. During this waiting period, I kept sending emails, and when I was ready, I entered the number 55144545.

The PIN you entered is incorrect. Please wait 4096 seconds to continue...

I barely slept that night. The 1, 4, 5 PIN kept me awake, not so much because of the $8,000, but because I was stupid enough to lose the paper and then forget the PIN. I also hated the idea that the bitcoins could continue to increase in value and I wouldn’t be able to access them. If I couldn’t recall the PIN, this Trezor wallet would likely be ridiculed for the rest of my life.

Search: April 5, 2017: 7.4 BTC = 8325 USD

That morning, bleary-eyed, I began searching for some way to recover my Bitcoin that didn't involve a PIN or seed phrase. If I lost my debit card PIN, I could contact my bank and eventually regain access to my funds. Bitcoin is different. No one person owns the Bitcoin network. Instead, thousands of computers around the world running software verify the system's transactions. Anyone can install the Bitcoin software on their computer and participate. The decentralized nature of the Bitcoin network is not without consequences, the main problem being that if you screw up, you're the one responsible.

I went to the /r/TREZOR community on Reddit and posted a message asking for help:

Feel free to laugh at me, I deserve it. I wrote down my PIN and recovery phrase on the same piece of paper. I had planned to carve the phrases into a metal pole and hide it away, but before I could do that, my cleaning lady threw the paper in the trash. Now I can't remember my password, and I've guessed wrong 13 times. I have to wait over an hour for another guess, and soon it will take years. Is there anything I can do now? Or do I just have to kiss my 7.5 bitcoins goodbye?

Most of the responses were sympathetic or unhelpful. One person said I should contact a wallet recovery service, which performs brute force attacks on encrypted Bitcoin wallets. I emailed them, hoping they could help. Someone named "Dave Bitcoin" responded to me the next day:

"I'm willing to help you... but I don't think of any solution to your problem. You either have to guess your password correctly or find your mnemonic phrase."

On the Reddit forum, a user named zero404cool gave an interesting response:

“All your information is still stored on the Trezor and someone knows how to find it. I’ve seen cases where that happened.”

He added in another post:

“Keep your Trezor wallet secure. Don’t do anything. There’s no need to try different PINs. You can regain access to all your Bitcoins.”

Other forum users believe that zero404cool is not trustworthy, one calls him a scammer, and another accuses him of spreading "FUD" (fear, uncertainty, "doubt) about the security of the Trezor wallet. I tend to agree with them, especially when seeing the manufacturer's claims that the trezor can withstand any hacking attack. Its official website mentions that the most direct way to crack the trezor and unlock the PIN code and keyword is by installing unofficial firmware, which only affects the wiping of Trezor storage.

To get confirmation, I emailed Trezor and explained my predicament. A customer service representative sent me an email with an "Emergency Guide," none of which applied to my situation. She wrote:

"In all cases, if you need to access your funds, you will need a PIN or recovery phrase. Unfortunately, if you don't have at least one of these, no one will be able to help you access the funds in that particular account. Mark, is there anything else I can help you with?"

The situation was starting to look hopeless. During this time, zero404cool sent me a private message on Reddit, saying he could help:

Yes, I can help you if you're willing to accept my help. Obviously, you won't find these instructions anywhere online. And it takes a certain amount of skill to do them correctly. A professional could extract all the information in 10 seconds. But it won't be available to the public, ever.

The thing is I don't know you. I don't know if your story is true. I don't even know if you are a real person with a Trezor. You could easily request this and hack into someone else's device, for example. I won't allow that to happen.

So, we have to earn each other's trust.

I wrote back and told zero404cool that he could Google my name, which would help him decide if he could trust me. He discovered that I was one of the first editors of Wired magazine, and that I founded the popular Boing Boing website, which has 5 million unique readers per month. I am also the editor-in-chief of the technology project magazine Make. A few moments later, zero404cool sent me a response:

Hi Mark, it looks like you are not afraid of command line programs. I guess we can do this recovery as a DIY project? I'm a bit busy at the moment, so I hope you are not in a rush?

I replied that I was in no hurry. After that, I didn't hear back from him.

Hypnotic: May 25, 2017: 7.4 BTC = $12,861

"Hypnosis allows us to open all channels, all information," Michele Guzy said. I was sitting in a reclining chair in her Encino office. My wife, a journalist and editor, had interviewed Michele a few years ago for a story about hypnosis. I was desperate about the PIN, so I arranged to meet with Michele.

Early in the conversation, Michele asked me to reenact the process of writing the PIN on a piece of yellow paper. She put the paper in her desk drawer and asked me to sit down, open the drawer, and look at the paper again. She explained that we were trying different techniques to trigger my memory of the PIN.

These exercises did not bring me back to consciousness, but Michele told me that they were just preparations for the hypnotic work that was to come. She dimmed the lights and spoke to me in a pleasant monotone. She asked me to imagine walking down a long escalator, and as she spoke, I felt more and more trance-like. This hypnotic journey lasted at least 15 minutes, and I felt relaxed, but I didn't feel like I was hypnotized. I thought I should keep trying, because maybe it would help a little.

After spending nearly 4 hours in her office, I decided that the PIN should be 5514455.

It took me a few days to work up the courage to give it a try. Every time I thought about Trezor, my head filled with blood and I broke out in a cold sweat. Then I tried the number and the Trezor wallet told me it was wrong. I had to wait 16,384 seconds, or about 4 and a half hours, before I could make the next attempt.

Final guess: August 12, 2017: 7.4 BTC = $28,749

I tried to stop thinking about Bitcoin, but I couldn’t help it. To make matters worse, the price of Bitcoin had been rising this summer with no end in sight. In July, eccentric software entrepreneur John McAfee tweeted that a single Bitcoin would reach $500,000 in three years, and “if it doesn’t happen, I’ll eat a dick on national television,” he said in typical understatement. I didn’t really expect the price of Bitcoin to rise much (or that McAfee would follow through on his promise), but it fueled my anxiety.

I couldn't escape the fact that the only thing blocking my access to this wealth was a simple number, a number that I could not recall, hypnotize, or blame myself for. I felt helpless, and my daughter stalked me and said, "What is the password to Bitcoin?" It didn't help. Some nights, before I fell asleep, I would lie in bed and let my mind search for the PIN. When I woke up, I found nothing. I had tried everything I could think of. The value of the Bitcoins was growing, but they were getting farther and farther away from me. I imagined them heading towards the dimming horizon. I would be dead before I found them.

Carla and I were folding laundry that evening when Sarina came in. She was staying home for the summer. “I know what the password to Bitcoin is!” she said. “It should be 55445!”

"Why do you think so?" I asked.

“Well, you sometimes use 5054 as your password, but since Trezor doesn’t have a zero, you just skip the zero. You don’t use 5154, you just use 554 and then add 45 to it,” (I sometimes put 45 in my password because it means something to me.)

Carla looked at me and said, "Your eyes lit up, maybe that's the number," and I thought she might be right.

Sarina said, "If it's not 55445, try 554455 because sometimes you add 455 to the end of your password."

"Maybe," I said. "I'll give it some thought tonight, and if I think the numbers are right, I'll try it tomorrow."

The next morning, I decided to try these numbers. I decided they were better than any other numbers I could think of. I plugged in my Trezor wallet and had to wait another 16,384 seconds before I could enter my PIN. It was Sunday, so I was home to run some errands.

When the Trezor timer went off, I asked Carla, Sarina, and Jane to gather around my computer. I wanted to get their moral support and make sure I entered the correct PIN, and if it turned out to be correct, I could also share my joy and celebrate with them.

I sat in the chair while Jane, Sarina, and Carla stood around me. My heart was pounding and I tried to control my breathing. Then I slowly entered the PIN. Every time I entered a number, I waited for my family to confirm. After entering 55445, my mouse cursor hovered in front of the page. "Are you ready?" I asked. They all said ok, and I clicked confirm.

The PIN you entered is incorrect. Please wait 32,768 seconds to continue...

"Shit" I cursed.

"It's okay, Dad," Sarina said. "When can we try the number 554455?"

I opened my calculator.

"Nine hours."

Carla put her hand on my shoulder and said, “If you can’t guess a few more times, you should crack it,” which seemed like the right thing to do. Soon I’d be plugging in my Trezor wallet and waiting for months on end (if you unplugged it, the countdown would start over), then years, then decades.

Since we moved into this home 10 years ago, we've been living in a house that loses power about once a year due to tripped breakers, rain, or DWP maintenance. I could buy an uninterruptible power supply to power the Trezor, but I wanted to end the wait as soon as possible, and hacking it was the best way to do it.

The next day before breakfast, I walked into the office alone and tried the number 554455.

The PIN you entered is incorrect. Please wait 65,536 seconds to continue...

Email: August 16, 2017: 7.4 BTC = $32,390

What is wrong with my brain? If I were still in my 20s or 30s, would I remember this PIN? I felt sorry for myself when I saw an email from Satoshi Labs, the manufacturer of the Trezor.

The subject line reads, "TREZOR 1.5.2 Firmware Security Update."

The email mentioned that this update is to fix a security issue that affects all devices with firmware lower than 1.5.2. The email also mentioned:

"In order to exploit this issue, an attacker would have to have physical access to the device, and they would also need to flash the device with specially crafted firmware. If your device is intact, your seed is safe, and you should update your firmware to 1.5.2 as soon as possible. By upgrading to version 1.5.2, this attack vector is eliminated and your device is safe."

So, there is a security vulnerability in the Trezor wallet that I can exploit? I visited the r/TREZOR forum to see what people were talking about. The first thing I saw was a Medium post by someone who claimed that he knew how to exploit the vulnerability mentioned in the email. The title of the post was: "Trezor security issue can lead to your private keys being exposed!"

The author attached a photo of the disassembled Trezor wallet and a dump file with 24 keywords and PIN codes. The author also attached a link to a custom Trezor firmware in the article, but did not explain how to use it.

I read the article a few times after I saw that the author's name was Doshay Zero404Cool. He was the same person who contacted me on Reddit five months ago! Then I went back to the private conversation with zero404cool and saw that he responded to another message of mine a few months ago:

Hey, did you find your PIN? If not, your locked coins are so small that it's hardly worth the effort to recover them. Even at today's prices, maybe, just maybe, if you split the coins with me, I'll do it for you...

I considered accepting zero404cool's advice, but before I decided, I consulted with Andreas M. Antonopoulos, a Bitcoin expert I have known for many years and the author of "Internet of Money". I have interviewed Andreas many times and he is a well-respected security consultant in the Bitcoin world.

He knows more about Bitcoin than anyone I have ever met. I emailed him on August 20th and told him that I could not access my $30,000 worth of Bitcoin stored in my Trezor wallet. I asked him if the vulnerability in the Trezor wallet could give me a chance to recover my Bitcoin. "The vulnerability described in the article is real and can be used to recover your mnemonic phrase, because you did not upgrade the firmware to 1.5.2 (I guess)."

I'm glad I didn't upgrade the firmware to 1.5.2, as doing so would have permanently erased my recovery phrase and pin.

Andreas then said that he knew a "coding expert" who did a lot of work on Trezor and related software. "This kid is only 15 years old. His name is Saleem Rashid. He lives in the UK." Andreas has never met him, but he has spent a lot of time chatting with him on Slack. Satoshi Labs, the manufacturer of Trezor, also knows Saleem and even sent him a few Trezor wallets in development for experimentation. Andreas suggested that we chat privately with Saleem on the Telegram app.

A few minutes later, Andreas introduced me to Saleem:

“Mark’s Trezor wallet is locked and he can’t access it. He is hoping for a miracle.”

Andreas laid out his plan: Saleem would initialize one of his Trezor wallets with the same firmware as mine, crack it after practice, and then send me the program via Telegram. I would buy a second Trezor wallet and practice installing and executing Saleem's attack until I could master it. Then, as Andreas said, I would execute this "attack" on the target device (my Trezor wallet with 7.4 Bitcoins).

But before we go any further, Andreas says, “It’s always best to clarify expectations and conditions before executing. There’s a chance it will succeed, but there’s also a chance it will fail (which is more likely).”

I told Saleem that I would like a step-by-step video instruction. I offered 0.05 BTC ($200) and was willing to pay an additional 0.2 BTC ($800) if I was able to successfully get my Bitcoin back. Saleem agreed to the terms. I added, "If you end up spending a significant amount of time on the instructional work, let me know and we can increase the payment accordingly."

I ordered a second Trezor wallet on Amazon, during which Saleem told me that the cracking would require the use of the open source operating system Ubuntu Linux, which I then installed on my old MacBook Air.

Fees: August 24, 2017: 7.4 BTC = $32,387

Saleem:

Hey Mark, the video is done but I want to increase the payment for some reason.

Making this video was absolutely hell for me. (I don't have a proper camera, so I had to do some elaborate mounting system that took me ages to set up)

I also need to write code for the exploitable firmware (I think this should be factored into the price).

I:

I accept this statement

Saleem:

So, for the work on the video and firmware development, the compensation is 0.35 BTC, and if you succeed, you can pay me another 0.5 BTC, what do you say?

The total is 0.85 BTC.

I know that's a bit of an increase, but I think it's reasonable for the work I do.

Saleem's asking price was the equivalent of $3,700, almost 4 times what I had asked, but I felt it was worth it (and much better than what zero404cool had offered). I would gladly pay Saleem the price he offered if I could see my PIN again (which others had told me was irretrievable). Like Andreas said, it would be a miracle. Shouldn't I pay for it?

I:

Have you tested it on a Trezor with the same firmware as mine?

Saleem:

In the video, I installed firmware 1.4.0 on my TREZOR wallet, and after setting it up, I deliberately entered the wrong PIN several times (so that its status is the same as your wallet)

I:

OK, let's trade.

Saleem gave me his Bitcoin address, and I transferred 0.35 Bitcoins to him through an online wallet. A minute later, he uploaded two files, one called exploit.bin and the other a 10-minute video. The video captured his computer monitor and showed him typing Linux command lines in a terminal window. There was no sound in the video. In the lower right corner of the video, there was a picture-in-picture of his Trezor wallet.

I know very little about the Linux command line, so what I saw made little sense to me. The first part of the video just explains how to initialize a test Trezor wallet and downgrade the firmware to version 1.4.0 so I can practice on my second Trezor wallet. The last three minutes of the video are the actual instructions for installing and using the vulnerable firmware.

I asked Saleem how he explained how these hacks work. He told me that when the Trezor is powered on, its firmware (basically, it's the Trezor's operating system) copies the PIN and 24 mnemonics in an unencrypted form to the Trezor's static memory (the memory that the Trezor uses to store information). If you cleverly implement what's called a "soft reset," you can install the vulnerable firmware without erasing the static memory. This allows you to see your PIN and mnemonics.

My second Trezor arrived on Friday. I was eager to start hacking it, but I had to wait until Saturday because I had to record a bunch of podcasts that afternoon, and the only thing I did on Friday was cut open the practice Trezor wallet and remove its printed circuit board. I used a broken blade and slowly and gently pulled it along the seam until I was able to separate the circuit board. Even though it was just a practice Trezor, I broke into a cold sweat and my hands were shaking. The relationship between me and the Trezor wallet over the past five months has been horrible, and I can't think rationally about it. I was afraid of screwing up. After I opened it, I plugged it in to make sure it was still powered. I did it.

Vulnerability: August 26, 2017: 7.4 BTC = $32,208

That Friday night, I slept surprisingly well. Carla and Sarina were out, and Jane was in her bedroom practicing her ukulele and Japanese. I cleaned up the small table, then opened my MacBook, running Linux, and connected the USB cable to my practice Trezor wallet. Following Saleem's example, I placed it on the table.

I then watched Saleem's video again, this time writing down the Linux command lines he entered in a text file so I could copy and paste into a terminal window. In the video, Saleem used a pair of tweezers to shorten two pins on the circuit board. The pins were tiny, and I knew my hands would be too shaky to manipulate with tweezers. Instead, I used a few wires and buttons to rig it up, making it easier to reset the Trezor wallet.

Following the instructions, I successfully downgraded the firmware to version 1.4.0. I set a PIN for my test Trezor (2468) and wrote down 24 mnemonics. I then installed the exploitable firmware, which required typing in a dozen different Linux commands, and a few more command lines after pressing the reset button. Success! The practice Trezor wallet was successfully cracked, and I could successfully see the recovered mnemonics and PIN on the Mac monitor. I repeated the whole process six more times, which took me all morning and most of the afternoon. I was surprised to see that it was already 3:45 pm when I finished all this. Time passed quickly, and I missed lunch and my usual afternoon espresso. On this day, I had no desire for either.

I was ready to try this hack on the real person. I called Jane in and asked her to help me record a video of the happy event of my bitcoin recovery.

One thing that has made me nervous over the past few days is whether I have a password in addition to my PIN, as I am not sure that this is an extra security feature provided by Trezor. After five months of being unable to access it, I am not sure if I have set such a password. Saleem and Andreas both told me that if my Trezor wallet does have such a password, then it is really game over.

I still have doubt about it, it's like an icicle in my heart.

I plugged in my Trezor wallet and typed:

sudo trezorctl get_features

This command will display the Trezor status information on the screen. I stared around the screen until I saw these words:

passphrase_protection: false

Yes! That's what I wanted to see. Now there is almost nothing stopping me from getting my Bitcoin back.

When I was supposed to press the buttons on my Trezor wallet, my fingers didn't obey me. "I'm shaking so much," I said to Jane. I had to stop and rest for a while. I tried again, but failed again. On the third attempt, I succeeded in pressing all three buttons at the same time. This reset the Trezor, allowing me to install exploit.bin.

I loaded Saleem’s custom firmware onto my Trezor wallet by typing the following command line:

sudo trezorctl firmware_update -f exploit.bin

This command line will remove the existing firmware and install Saleem's version. The Trezor display reads:

"The new firmware has been uploaded successfully. You can now unplug the TREZOR."

I definitely shouldn’t have unplugged the Trezor at this point. (I remember Andreas warning me: “A power loss during a firmware upload is catastrophic, and you’ll lose all your data.”)
Instead, I soft-reset the Trezor wallet by pressing a button I had connected to the PCB. A triangle icon with an exclamation mark inside it appeared on the wallet display, which said:

"Warning, unofficial software detected"

Thanks for the heads up, I thought to myself. That's exactly what I wanted to do: allow unofficial software on this damn thing. I pressed one of the buttons on the Trezor wallet to confirm that I wanted to proceed, and the screen said EXPLOIT, which meant that Saleem's software was successfully installed on the Trezor wallet. There was no turning back. Either it worked, or it wiped my information and my Bitcoin would be gone forever, even if I remembered my PIN at some point in the future. Now I needed to enter some command lines to read the contents of the Trezor's static RAM (the part with my 24 mnemonics and PIN).

"Okay," I told Jane as I typed the command line, "After this operation, it will tell us the mnemonic." I leaned on the keyboard and pressed the Enter key.

I sat down and said calmly, "Oh my god, it worked."

The 24 mnemonic words I wrote last December, the seed secret words I missed in March, are now flashing on my computer screen. At this point, I could have stopped, and these 24 words are the only thing I need to restore 7.4 bitcoins. I can reset the Trezor wallet and enter the words in, and I will do the same. But I still have one thing that I have to do, and it is even more important than money, which is to find out the Trezor PIN code that has bothered me for a long time.

Following Saleem's instructions, I copied the text string of the terminal window and added it to the Linux command line provided by Saleem. The PIN code immediately showed up in front of my eyes:

45455544

The broken anxiety of souls dissipated for months. I stood up, raised my arms, and started laughing. I successfully conquered Trezor's nearly cruel PIN delay feature. I thought, I won.

作者：Mark Frauenfelder (@frauenfelder)