A lot of people who get involved with Bitcoin and digital currency have little to no idea about what they should do if their Bitcoin wallet gets lost or stolen. While it is certainly true this is a very annoying situation; funds can be recovered in a lot of cases. Tahoe-LAFS can testify that retrieving a lot of Bitcoin funds is a great feeling, especially when all seemed lost.
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Bitcoin Wallet Lost and Recovered
Accepting donations – or getting paid – in Bitcoin is a great feeling , and users should cherish the feeling of complete financial freedom every single second. However, most people have little to no respect for the necessary steps to back up their wallet and associated encryption keys, just in case something were to go wrong.
Back in the earlier days of Bitcoin, people would get a lot of donations or contributions which were worth next to nothing at the Bitcoin price at that time. However, the value of Bitcoin has increased by a significant margin in recent years, and it looks like a future price increase is not unlikely. Then again, it is hard to guess whether or not this will effectively happen.
One thing to take into account is how a lot of people used to run a Bitcoin wallet on older computers, which may have been stored away or even suffered from a hard drive crash. It is well worth the time to recover these devices and hard drives, and make sure there are no unspent bitcoins left behind. Making a wallet backup is mandatory, yet hardly anyone seems to do so. Moreover, creating a backup of the private key will let users important their address in just about any other software solution.
All Bitcoin users need to make sure they keep both digital and physical backups of their Bitcoin wallet and private keys. One never knows when it might come in handy, as the hardware we use on a daily basis can fail at any given time. If that were to happen, it would be quite a shame to see funds going missing.
Educational efforts are needed in this regard, to make people more aware of how they should treat their digital wallets. Slowly but surely, our society is evolving to a more digital form of cash, and taking the proper security precautions is more important than ever before. Backups should be a norm rather than an exception by now ,but that is not the case ,unfortunately.
Source: Ars Technica
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