Thanks for the heads up!

I wish I'd thought about this when playing with bitcoin a few months after launch and amassing an integer value larger than zero. That wallet died with the hard drive.

Please tell me you still have the hard drive. There’s a chance for recovery, and I have some experience in this area if you want some tips. Step 0 is always keep your drives for future recovery attempts.

It was dumped many, many years ago while BTC was still a novelty paying for pizza in the thousands BTC per. I went to see if I still had a backup of the wallet with a USD:BTC spike a few years back and it was gone.

Life goes on, even when sad things happen :(

Think of it this way: by starving the supply of that one bitcoin, you have contributed in some small way to the eventual loss of all bitcoins through similar events - speeding up the rate at which the world can move on from this silly fad.

ddrescue may be of interest if you still have the disk.

That's `dd` for broken disks. It keeps a log of data it couldn't read, and can keep trying to read it indefinitely, it even supports a save state and can resume trying again later.

I've recovered filesystems from several failed disks using it. It's not fast though!

The extreme version of this is using an HSM, and putting one in a safe deposit box.

It's not so extreme, you have to trust the HSM manufacturer.

Try generating randomness using casino-grade dice, and xor-ing it with the HSM. Maybe then.

Now I'm wondering who's managed to pull off supply chain attacks on dice, since I'm sure it's happened already.