My 0.023 BTC mistake ($1,136)

On Friday, March 5h, I went to withdraw 0.02323189 BTC from an exchange to a hardware wallet. I first tried a segwit address, but the withdrawal window just disappeared without an error message. I knew they didn't support bech32 segwit, but thought a normal segwit address would be fine. Then I tried a non-segwit address and had the same experience. No obvious error in the interface... and then I remembered how this exchange requires each withdrawal address to be whitelisted before you can use it.

So I quickly went through the process of pasting in the address I wanted to send to (which starts with "1DxDb...") and setting it up as a valid whitelisted withdrawal address.

And then this is where I screwed up.

I went back to the whitelisted addresses and copied the top BTC address on the list, thinking the newest address would be first. I didn't pay attention to the "Added on" date:

I sent the tokens and never saw them in my device (which is a Jubiter wallet I was trying out for the first time). I double checked the address and realized what I did wrong. Now I had to figure out where that BTC is.

When you use crypto, you are your own bank. You have to keep track of your own transaction history. I do that in a spreadsheet and was disappointed to not see this transaction in my spreadsheet on 8/28/2017:

Now I was really confused.

I sent a support request to the exchange explaining my mistake, but had very low expectations they would know who that address belonged to (it looked like an exchange) or that they would respond in a reasonable timeframe.

All weekend I figured the money was probably gone forever.

Then I started thinking about if there might be a clue in my email, so I filtered through my messages around that date and found an email that explained it all! I had helped someone out back then with some token conversion related to Stellar and transferred the BTC to their exchange account. I sent them an email yesterday afternoon in the hope that they still had access to that account and could send the funds back. Last night at Crypto Mondays, two hours after I sent my email, I saw this notification on my phone:

Woo hoo!!! Hooray!

So yeah, that was really stupid of me. I know many people who have lost cryptocurrency because of mistakes like this. Crypto is too hard to use. I'm a technologist who has been at this for more than 8 years, and I still made this mistake that could have cost me over a thousand dollars (much more than that if crypto continues to go up in value).

This is why I work so hard on the FIO Protocol. https://fioprotocol.io/

If the exchange I was using integrated the FIO Protocol, this never would have happened. My withdrawal would have been a FIO Request (a decentralized, encrypted payment request) from my wallet to the exchange where I could review, verify, and approve the request as coming from luke@stokes. No complicated strings of letters and numbers. No chance for this mistake.

If you don't yet have a FIO Address, you can get a free one here (for now): https://fioprotocol.io/free-fio-addresses/ There are many wallets and exchanges in the FIO Ecosystem, and we're building a Dapp to make onboarding even easier in the future.

Please help spread the word about the FIO Protocol. If you know people in the cryptocurrency industry working on crypto-enabled products and services, encourage them to integrate FIO. They can start here: https://developers.fioprotocol.io/ and reach out to the team in Discord here: http://fioprotocol.io/chat

We have to make crypto easier for everyone. Mass adoption is just around the corner, and the industry is not ready yet. We have a lot of work to do.

Want to help?