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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday February 26 2020, @07:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the up-in-smoke dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

"In early 2017, he had just over 6,000 Bitcoin in one account, but he feared it may be too easy for a hacker to access," the Irish Times noted this month. "He decided to spread his wealth across 12 new accounts and transferred exactly 500 Bitcoin, worth almost €4.5m, into each of them."

The keys to those accounts were written on a piece of paper and stashed with Collins' fishing rod for safekeeping.

But later that year, Collins was cuffed and jailed for five years for drug possession, as dealers are prone to do. Believing his tenant was no longer able to make rent, Collins' landlord emptied his house and threw out, among other things, the pot peddler's fishing gear.

As it turns out, within the aluminum case of the weed-slinger's fishing rod was the sheet of A4 paper on which the digital keys to 12 Bitcoin wallets was scribbled. The paper was, among Collins' other belongings, sent to a dump in Galway and, it is believed, ultimately incinerated at a facility in either Germany or China.


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  • (Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday February 26 2020, @10:16AM (2 children)

    by Common Joe (33) <{common.joe.0101} {at} {gmail.com}> on Wednesday February 26 2020, @10:16AM (#962786) Journal

    Seriously, the guy goes to the trouble of splitting his Bitcoin into different wallets, and we're supposed to believe that he wrote all twelve keys on the same piece of paper, and had only one copy of this? Riiiight...

    I believe it. I've seen lots of users do a lot worse than this with my eyes. Passwords on post its, passwords on the white board, passwords on post its on the whiteboard, ..., passwords like "12345", passwords stored in git, passwords used on multiple websites... and these examples are just from the "IT professionals" I've worked with. As in, like, they were making their living by doing pretty complicated IT stuff. I can't get into details, but they were doing things well beyond merges between Word and Excel. It usually involved programming languages.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @10:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @10:30AM (#962788)

    my brain evolved to remember smells, sounds, images and such stuff. not my fault your security system is not designed properly.

  • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday February 27 2020, @02:07AM

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday February 27 2020, @02:07AM (#963281) Journal
    You always store a password on a post it under the keyboard. Then you check the logs to see any bad login attempts. Because the postit password is not your real password, just bait.
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