Mark Frauenfelder is a research director in an organization called Blockchain Futures Lab. It is not a large entity. It is simply one of many initiatives that exist to explore the opportunities and limits of blockchain technology.
His job is to explore, identify the edges of this technology in areas such as economic, social and even political. The task could almost be related more to an intellectual than productive motivation. It does not even seem that this is the main work of Frauenfelder, who previously earned his living as a journalist and editor in the media.
One day, driven by his commitments in the Blockchain Futures Lab, Frauenfelder spent $ 3,000 to buy bitcoins. The virtual currency is for now the maximum expression of blockchain technology and its most popular project. It is also a bonfire in the middle of the field for a horde of predators of speculation, which has caused the value of the cryptocurrency to oscillate lately like a piece of rope attached to a sports car.
In 2016 it had a time when it was around 400 dollars, but the year 2017 has already started with a value of about 1,000. So far this year has reached over 3,000, then fell below 2,000, only to bounce to 5,000, go back down to 3,200 and resume the climb to caress with all fingers of the hand the 7,000 dollars .
If there is a pathology that can define the attitude with which Frauenfelder observed these ups and downs surely anxiety is. It was in January 2016 when he made his purchase of bitcoins. Approximately when his investment was worth twice the value he had paid for it, this father decided to insure his income. To do so, he opted for Trenzor, a platform that shields the keys to access a Bitcoin account in a 'hardware wallet' -a kind of USB-, so that in order to make transactions it is not necessary to expose them publicly. If the user forgets his PIN, he can always regain access to his account with a 24-word code.
A little later, when the bitcoins were worth 2.5 times their original value, Frauenfelder had a trip to Tokyo with his wife. His daughters were not at home and a fleeting thought crossed his brain before leaving for the airport. And if something happens?
Driven by an impulse, Frauenfelder took the paper where he had written down the PIN to access the USB with his Bitcoin and the 24-word code, left written instructions and deposited it under the pillow of one of his daughters.
He completely forgot the subject in Tokyo. Until he came back from the trip. Then he asked his daughter. I had not seen any paper. Then he asked his wife, cleaning service, searched the pillow, the room, in the trash (here you have to imagine Frauenfelder in the communal trash cans, with rubber gloves, extracting the most pomegranate among the waste of the Angels). No luck.
Nothing happened either. With your Frauenfelder user number you could follow the relevant process to recover your account. He remembered his user number, but when he entered it, he gave an error. He reintroduced it, in case it had been confused in some digit, and the error message went up again.
And this is where Frauenfelder begins an epic path to rescue his bitcoins, as he saw his price increase. He searched forums, he went through all the threads of Reddit and wrote in any space where he felt he had some chance of finding a solution. He even resorted to hypnosis in order to recover that lost user number somewhere in his memory. He also went through moments of family epiphany, with his mother or his daughters faithfully believing that the user number should be this or that.
Frauenfelder tried everything until, through an acquaintance, he found a 15-year-old kid expert in hacking Trenzor, the armor platform he had used. The teenager agreed to develop a solution tailored to the problem and so, with the magic of a hack, he agreed to what was already $ 32,287.
In total, ten times more than the initial value. In the end the wait was worth it.
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