I am among the seemingly numbers of people who cannot find where they saved the airdrop seed words on their computers. Were we instructed to save it ? If so , have we been hacked and had our saved seed deleted? When I go to https://mainnet.decred.org/ and check my airdrop address, it shows the balance of 282 Decred at the address. But when I created my decred.org wallet, the balance is zero and the airdrop address I generated for the airdrop is not there. I wish I could retrace my steps during registering for the airdrop and confirming my address, so that I could find out if we were directed to save the 33 word seed at that time, or to write it down etc. I can not remember what happened during that registration. Maybe we were told to save it for registration for the airdrop , but not cautioned that we would need it later to make the wallet? I am boggling as to what happened because I would have diligently followed the directions. is the seed a file name that we could look for on our systems? Anything?
I will start by saying: DO NOT SHARE YOUR SEED OR HEX WITH ANYONE With that said, you were absolutely instructed to save your seed and that it was critical to claim the airdrop. When you generated your seed, it said: "WRITE DOWN THE SEED GIVEN BELOW. YOU WILL NOT BE GIVEN ANOTHER CHANCE TO. <33 word seed> <hex> IMPORTANT: Keep the seed in a safe place as you will NOT be able to restore your wallet without it. Please keep in mind that anyone who has access to the seed can also restore your wallet thereby giving them access to all your funds, so it is imperative that you keep it in a secure location. Once you have stored the seed in a safe and secure location, enter OK here to erase the seed and all derived keys from memory. Derived public keys and an address will be stored in the file specified (default: keys.txt):" If you happened to copy your hex, there is a utility to convert it back to your seed words. Search the forum for it.
Of course your airdrop address with the airdrop balance is not there if you create a random wallet from scratch. Without the seed for the airdrop address you can not restore that particular wallet which you have generated for the airdrop. Saved seed deleted by hackers? You write a seed on paper and preferably on multiple copies stored at different locations. You don't risk losing your coins in a HDD crash or by carelessly deleting a text file or a photo on your mobile. To "be your own bank" means to act like a bank.
it looks like I and several hundred people may have thought that once we went through the whole airdrop confirmation , that we were finished with the seed. I would have at least saved it on my computer, even if i lost the paper. What are the odds of losing both the paper and also losing the seed word list from my computer? seems like this happened to a lot of people who took all the steps to get through the airdrop , possibly over a thousand of us, as some one noted how few have actually claimed their coins.
That stat on bitcointalk thread only shows how many people have not moved their coins from original address it was sent to. It has no relation if someone was able to create their airdrop wallet. If you successfully created your wallet but didn't use those coins then your coins will show as unspent on explorer. That stat was merely used to know that how many coin were not on the market for sell in a very loose sense. For example i created my wallet successfully but never moved the coins. There are others who created there wallets but used the coins to buy tickets. So that stat shows those wallets who never moved there coins but it doesn't mean the wallets were not created. Similarly some coins were moved but not sold but used to buy tickets.
Yes, many people who registered for airdrop had apparently no idea how cryptomoney (Bitcoin, Decred...) works. Which is a pity since tens of thousands of coins now ended in black holes because people did not save their private keys (in form of a seed which is the basis of a deterministic wallet) and are therefore not able to spend these coins. Correction: These people did not take all the steps to go through the airdrop. When you generated the airdrop address you got this message: "IMPORTANT: Keep the seed in a safe place as you will NOT be able to restore your wallet without it." I agree however that the message should have been much more clear so that even people who have no clue how it works would have understood it, e.g. "WRITE DOWN THIS SEED NOW AND DO NOT LOSE IT EVER OR YOU WILL NOT RECEIVE ANY COINS" I am sure that would have emphasized the importance of the seed propely Devs have probably assumed everyone applying has already experience with Bitcoin and other coins and so would understand at least the very basic about cryptomoney and what it means to be responsible for keeping your money safe. That was obviously a wrong assumption.
I think the Paymetheus GUI will go a long way towards mitigating these kinds of mistakes for future users when it's released (for Windows users only, obviously). When a wallet doesn't exist and you choose to create a new wallet rather than importing an existing seed, the seed is first displayed to the user. The user must then continue to the next page in the startup dialog which requires them to type the seed back in. Most importantly, the seed is NOT shown at that time, so the user must copy it from somewhere else (hopefully a paper backup). It's not foolproof. Paper seeds can be lost, and the really lazy users could take a screenshot of the application instead of actually making a physical copy (I do this for testnet wallets, well, because it's testnet). But with the correct wording and an application task flow that makes it difficult to do the wrong thing, I think we can go a long way to prevent users from permanently losing access to their wallets.
Yes, I have not touched my airdrop coins yet. Neither imported nor spent. No hurry to do so. The airdrop was a good idea to gain attention and create some publicity. And it was a bad idea because many people were attracted who did not understand how it works, did not take the time to read about it and therefore sent lots of coins directly into black holes. It could have been avoided if review process would have been much stricter. Not only filtering out scammers who applied multiple times but filtering out people with no proven history in cryptomoney (as it was communicated actually). That would have included me too since I didn't even bother to provide anything to prove that I have a history in this. But I wouldn't care anyway since I am happily mining this coin. Therefore if you lost the seed, start mining or buy on the exchanges. Coins are still very cheap. That will change very soon.
Paper money can be lost. Gold can be lost. I know a guy who lost a car! The problem with trying to idiot proof something is that they keep coming out with better idiots!
Though when gold is lost, someone will find it again 100 years later or 5000 years later and it will still be like new and have the same buying power. With the central bank notes however the lucky finder can't even wipe...
That sucks RegenX, I'd be so frustrated with myself Sounds like, unless you can find that seed, you're shit out of luck. I recommend using a program like KeypassX or some other password storage program to keep backups of information like that locked down in a file with a password you can remember. There's a silver lining: all the airdrop coins that are effectively in the void now thanks to people losing their seeds will increase the value of everybody else's decred.
I mean, if you don't know a lot about cryptocurrency and technology, and you didn't keep track of your seed, then safety isn't really your forte anyway. A compromise like this would have at least gave dude a prayer at recovering his airdrop.
Yes, if he didn't forget that password too. I don't get it why people don't write the seed down on paper like it is meant to be. That's also the safest way to store passwords. Your family rarely will "hack" your papers and steal your credentials. And if they do you know who it was vs. 7 billion possible thieves for passwords stored on a networked device.
I wish you all would stop gloating over some one else's misfortune here. I suffer from intense chronic pain and insomnia and resultant forgetfulness. I found the paper that the words were written on , the correct 33 seed words, and the glitchy online Decred wallet site kept rejecting the seed words as 'invalid seed' , even though I typed them in by hand perfectly EXACTLY as they had been written down. Then some active forum member by the name of JEsse, who posed as a Decred developer, contacted me and conned me into giving him the seed words on the offer of 'helping' . The next day after that 'Jesse' stole the Decred from my airdrop address with those very same seed words. So thanks partially to the glitchy address site I lost my Decred. David contacted me the same day that JEsse stole the Decred and helped set up the binary wallet on my computer instead later that day, but it was already too late. By the time we created the Binary wallet on my computer, Jesse had already stolen the Decred from my airdrop address. But David proved that I had the right seed words, and in fact I was the one who inputted the the seed into the command line myself, so before you all gloat about how I must have screwed up the online wallet registration, I did it exactly correctly, exactly as I did with David's help. But thanks to thief Jesse, my airdrop is stolen, and we traced the stolen airdrop Decred to the address of another airdrop recipient. I have asked Ingsoc or anyone else if they have time , to try to confirm that my airdrop was transferred to Jesse's account. So far no one has helped with that. The attitude seems to be "well , too bad, you got a freebie and you gave your seed away after losing the paper it was written on for a few days". So a thief can steal here, and no one really cares, they'd rather gloat about how clever they are to have their airdrop while others get ripped off. you can read the thread on what happened here: https://forum.decred.org/threads/is-there-some-way-to-check-activity-in-wallet.825/ btw , I was an active advocate for Decred, very active on the forum at first, and then this happened. in other words I was trying to help out and make a difference unlike hundreds of others who got their airdrop and contributed nothing to this forum. Or worse, greedy scum like Jesse and Blizzy who seem to take a warning not to share a seed as an "I told you so" invitation to rip people off. and yes, I admit I fucked up and couldn't find my seed paper. So, I guess I'm the idiot here. Enjoy your Decred
yes , congratulatins on your reading skills, I gave the seed away, its my fault. I ignored the warning as a last resort. I had tried several times with the correct seed to create an online wallet at decred.org, and I thought that the seed may have been invalidated. I knew for a certainty that it was the correct seed. The reason I thought that my correct seed had been 'invalidated' by decred was because decred.org was telling me that what I knew was the correct seed was now 'invalid seed'. That part is not my fault . The fact that decred's own wallet site was telling me that my valid seed was 'invalid' is partially what led to this. That part of it is not my fault. Jesse posed as a developer trying to help me. That part of it is not my fault either. I thought Jesse was a developer and could deal possibly with the 'invalid seed' issue. All he did was insinuate himself enough to find out the seed words and then he disappeared and took my airdrop. Before I accepted his help , I checked his posting history, and he appeared to be developer on the surface of it.
But these things can be found... given enough time.. But you simply cannot create find a specific seed if there is no backup and it's been deleted.
- You're right. ^Unless, you wrote one of the 33 words wrong, when you copied them down. <- Then it would be entirely your own fault. - Actually. That IS your own fault. ^ You where specificly told. "Do not give your seed to anyone". - And by then doing so, no one else, can take responsibility for it. Don't trust people you don't know. Simple as that. Listen. I'm sorry, that you lost your freebie. It's a shame. ^ But you do make it out to be, everyone elses fault. When it's entirely your own. - When making the airdrop, you where told to keep the seed safe. And your initial post, stated, that you failed to do so. - Even going so far, as to think "you'd been hacked". And putting up some hypothesis about how other people had the same experience, based on "airdrops not moving". I'm not trying to be a dick here. But you did make loads of mistakes, and then try to put the responsibility of those mistakes, unto other people whom had nothing to do with your mistakes. - Which made me want to butt in. You'd probably want to make a post somewhere, about Jesse. - With proof of how he scammed you. ^ The last case I saw, was apparently resolved. With the victim atleast "being promised" to get his coins back, from the scammer. (whether he did or not, is out of my knowledge.)
nix my congratulations on your reading skills I already posted that I had the correct 33 words seed, exactly, and that David and I were able to create a binary decred wallet with it. the fact that someone chose to lie to me in order to steal from me is not my fault, try reading what I posted and no I didn't make it out to be everyone else's fault I admitted that I gave away the seed words knowiing that it was a risk, that doesnt make me the criminal because someone lies in order to steal from me that's like saying that if you go on a subway train in the wrong part of town and get attacked it's 'entirely your own fault' because people are warned that a certain part of the city is dangerous. You didn't punch yourself in the face, or hire someone to beat you up. You bought a train ticket. The point of my post here was to point out the judgmental and smug attitude