An investor posted a worrying account on Ledger’s Reddit in late November last year, claiming to have mysteriously lost around 27 bitcoins after trying to move his coins. The amount corresponds to R$5.7 million at the current price.
In the explanation, the user indicates that he has updated his Ledger Live, the Ledger application, to version 2.69.0, but encountered errors when executing a transaction.
“I tried to send an amount with a specific UTXO using Coin Control, but when I tried to send this transaction I got an error on the frontend and decided to send BTC the normal way, without specifying UTXO, and I had the same problem again – wrong”the investor stated. “Then I discovered that Ledger’s services were overloaded and many people were experiencing network issues and decided to try again later.”
The investor then says that hours later he discovered that all his bitcoins had been moved to an unknown address. Basically, 0.5 bitcoins were sent to the correct destination address, but about 27 bitcoins ended up at an inaccessible address.
“If you send BTC, there should be 2 exits. One for the recipient and one for change, so I can see 27 BTC in the address [de troco]they are still there, but I don’t have access to this address”the investor responded to another user who tried to help him on Reddit. “I sent 0.5 BTC, the recipient received his 0.5 BTC and other coins to an unknown address and it is still there.”
A strange story leads to even stranger assumptions
The investor’s story attracted nearly 700 comments on Reddit. While some tried to help him by suggesting he track all the addresses linked to his wallet, others tried to better understand the story.
One of the craziest ideas is the assumption that a cosmic ray hit the wallet at the moment the transaction was executed. As a result, this would generate an event known as a “bit flip”, changing a bit that would lead to the creation of a different and inaccessible exchange address.
“This could be a bit-flip event. You can check the following change address in your branch path. Is there a single bit difference between this address and 3DfG8…Sfi9d?”
Continuing his answer and citing an example, he notes that changing the fifth bit, from 1 to 0, would create a completely different address.
Although the theory seems unlikely, other users have reinforced the claim. One user noted that a cosmic ray has already changed the votes in an electronic ballot box in Belgium, giving a candidate 4,096 extra votes.
“The official explanation was ‘the spontaneous creation of a bit at position 13 in the computer’s memory’”points to an article on Wikipedia about the case that occurred in Belgium. “A likely explanation for the error was a one-off event caused by cosmic rays, which the voting system did not protect against.”
On Twitter, Narcélio Filho, a Brazilian Bitcoin expert, noted that these events are more common than we think and that hardware wallets may not provide sufficient protection against them.
“It’s quite common and I don’t know if the wallet cares”wrote Narcelio. “Absurd but common. IBM estimated one such error per month for every 265 MB of memory.”
Absurd but common. IBM estimated one such error per month for every 265 MB of memory.
Imagine losing money because a proton came from the other side of the universe to fuck you.
— Narcelio (@narcelio) December 17, 2023
Ledger intern asked investor to contact support
Returning to Reddit, a Ledger intern asked the investor who had lost 27 bitcoins to contact the company’s support. In addition to transaction logs, he also asked for a screenshot of the Bitcoin wallet and transaction history.
Even when a dozen users asked how the story ended, the intern didn’t respond to any of them. The author of the topic, who claimed to have lost 27 bitcoins, replied to some comments, but without revealing much.
“I’m here. Like I said, I can’t write, I’m traveling. I will read and answer all questions in a few days”noted the user who claims to have lost 5.7 million worth of Bitcoin. “I also have a support ticket from Ledger, so we will try to find out what happened. I’ll keep you informed!”
Finally, it’s worth noting that the above story took place days after Ledger was hacked. However, hackers only managed to steal Ethereum and other smaller coins without impacting Bitcoin accounts, which would not explain the above story.
Source: Live Coins
Barry Siefert is an accomplished journalist and author at The Nation View. He is known for his expertise in the field of cryptocurrency, and has written extensively on the topic. With a background in finance and economics, Barry has a deep understanding of the underlying technology and market forces that drive the crypto industry.
