Damaged people damage people.
It's how the world works.
— Not A Worker
By the time I left Doug's house, with his keys in my hand, it was 3am. After going home to make copies, I was back before sunrise to return the originals. As soon as I opened the front door, I could hear him snoring. It was easy to slip in and out, unnoticed.
With my confidence renewed, I headed to Noah Greer's house to finish the job. I had plenty of time since he was out of town, so I made a pot of coffee. There were already coffee grounds in the trash. Adding more wouldn't be a clue that anyone had been in his home.
I searched the house from top to bottom, but I couldn't find his Bitcoin seed words.
I did find four QR codes. I scanned 'em with my phone. One was for the password to his wifi. Thanks for that, bro. The other three were weird sets of numbers, like this, but much longer:
15580228194310011135...
"The fuck?!"
I also found a child's crayon drawing, stuck to the fridge with a huge magnet that said "Daddy."
"Double fuck. He has kids!?" How did I miss that?
I went through his calendar and old facebook posts again. His wife left him and moved to Denver, to be closer to her family. He wasn't there for a family reunion. He was visiting his kids. To make matters worse, his ex-wife got remarried. Noah's kids had a new happy family that he wasn't part of. Brutal.
And here I was, in his shitty house, to steal his Bitcoin.
Damaged people damage people. It's how the world works. But I decided to pass on doing further harm to this loser. At least for now.
I rinsed out the coffee mug and took pictures of the QR codes with my Polaroid, just in case they were something important. And I left.
I wasn't going to rob him right away, anyway.
The time spent at Noah Greer's place seemed like a massive waste, but it wasn't.
I learned something new.
After I got home and took a long nap, I started googling to see if I could figure out what those QR codes were for.
Turns out, they were sets of Bitcoin seed words converted to numbers all bunched together. Each 4 digit chunk represented a word from the Bitcoin word list. For example, 1558 means "security." This guy's security was shit.
A device called a SeedSigner uses the numbers to look up the words for the wallet, which it then loads. But Noah's wallet was tricky. The three sets of numbers I found at his place were all for one wallet that requires multiple keys. The term for that is Multisig. It's a thing.
Multiple keys means stronger security, except this idiot stored the QR codes for his keys together. That's a single point of failure. And worse, he labeled the QR codes 1, 2 and 3 of 3... so I knew how many I needed..
Thanks again, bro.
And thank you, YouTube, for info and tutorials.
I went back to Noah's place again to find his SeedSigner. I played with that thing for a while before I learned how to rebuild his wallet.
Once I restored his wallet, I saw that he'd been depositing Bitcoin into it twice a month for years. He had 0.81 BTC. I left it alone. Figured it made more sense to let him keep adding to it while I debated whether or not it was okay to rob him.
Editor's Note:
SeedSigner is an open source do-it-yourself Bitcoin hardware wallet, built from a Raspberry Pi Zero, a camera, and an LCD display. It uses QR codes to communicate with Bitcoin apps on a computer or phone.
Seed phrases stored as QR codes are a security risk unless they are encrypted or kept somewhere secure.
ShieldSigner is an enhanced fork of SeedSigner which solves this security risk by adding QR encryption and secure element smartcard compatibility, among many other features.
Also, as if it even needs to be said: It was not okay to rob Noah Greer.