How I lost $4,000 (in ETH) last night and I'm okay with it.

TLDR; Last night I created a new Ethereum wallet, and generated a 12 alphanumeric password, but forgot to save the password. I sent 300 ETH from Poloniex just to find out the next morning the password was no where to be found.

But I'm okay with it...

First an introduction:

Since 2013 I've been an avid (albeit small) cryptocurrency investor. I started out with only a few hundred dollars which I spent dabbling in primecoin, peercoin, and all the other bitcoin 1.0 protocols.

Nothing really hit til 2014 When I invested 0.5 BTC into something called Ethereum. After the release I was excited to find out I was the new owner of 1000 ETH. I ignored it, didn't really care, because it was only worth about $800 at the time... Around 2016 Ethereum shot up to $10 each, so I started to pay attention.

The Ethereum Presale Wallet

I downloaded the mist wallet, moved my presale wallet over, and to my fun surprise it asked me for my password! No big deal, I thought its probably something I've used before... ABC123, or was it AbC1234!, or was it abc!!D12. I couldn't remember it!!! A few searches online revealed that there was nothing I could do if this was the case. Forums had directed me to page where I had signed up and it says very distinctly "Do not lose this password". I kicked myself in the pants for a straight month til a friend pointed me to pyethrecover and after another month of combining random, but personally commonly, words a letters, symbols, and numbers my terminal came back with a match!!!

I was ecstatic, and couldn't be any more happy to have just acquired so much new wealth.

The DAO

So what did I do... I invested 400 ETH of it in a new project called The DAO. There is no reason to go into the long details here, because as you know, my portfolio went from $30,000 to $15,000 over night as the DAO hacker stole all the money. I spent the whole next month stressed out, grumpy at people, obsessively checking reddit and slack. My emotions were all over the place.

Just nine days ago the hardfork passed and I got my 400 ETH back, and I was beaming! People saw an extra pep in my step, I was smiling at everyone. Buying people lunch and coffee! It was an exciting time, but then...

Ethereum classic appeared...

Ethereum Classic

Excited to find out I had $2,500 waiting for me in ETC, I opened my wallet but chose the non-hard fork and sent all my ETC to Poloniex... but it didn't arrive... whew, well at least it was only ETC. So I opened the wallet with the hard fork to find all my money was missing except for the 400 from the DAO!!! I called a friend, very upset, who asked if I put my money in a split contract... excuse me... a split contract? Why would I do such a thing?... Because of the replay attack it turns out... Both forks are connected to each other, so when you move one around the other also moves.

I spent the entire day mad at myself! Frowning at everyone, depressed...

but then it turns out all the money eventually made it over to Poloniex that evening. All the ETH went to the ETC address, but it was okay. I looked at it for awhile, decided to transfer 1 ETC over to ETH, and then all of it. Instead of losing it all I made $2.5 * 600 ETH... no reason to tell of the emotions here, because in my tired stupor I transfer as much ETH as I could into my new mist wallet, only to realize the next day I couldn't find my password...