Honey, I minted an NFT!
Recap: Jessica’s NFTs were hacked but were returned.
Amy’s face turned pale. She was in a real panic. “Breath, honey!” Zack stroked Amy’s back, trying to calm her down. “Maybe you will be able to recall the key after you calmed down.”
“It is 64 random characters and numbers. I doubt anyone would be able to memorise the private keys,” said Jessica.
“There is no way I can recall it. You know me, I can’t even remember a password.” Amy was on the verge of crying. “How can I be so absent-minded? You have reminded me many times to keep it safe and now I have no clue at all where I have chucked it!”
“Amy, I know this is not comforting, but you are not the only one who made the mistake,” said Jessica. “Learn the lesson and don’t repeat that again. By the way, other than the private key, there is also a passphrase that is made up of 12 English words, do you have that?”
“Wait!” Amy started thinking out loud, “I think I know where I wrote the private key. I have them on a draft that I was working on. I left it on the dining table, and, hmm,” she stopped for a while, thinking hard, “When I was setting up the table for dinner, I gathered the papers on the table and chucked them with the pile of packaging that was meant for the recycle bin.”
Amy dashed to the kitchen, rummaged through the pile and came back with a piece of paper.
“You found it!” Zack saw that Amy was not looking good and asked, “What happened?”
“Two of the words are smeared. It must be my wet fingers.” Amy put the paper on the table. The last words are beyond recognition. She looked so defeated.
“Don’t give up just yet, honey. It is only the last 2 characters that are smeared. We can try to guess it. We can do that right, Jessica?” Zack asked.
“Yes, you can. The private key is using the hexadecimal system, meaning each character would have 16 possibilities. Now that you have lost two, 16 to the power of 2, there would be 256 possible combinations. Which is actually not too bad,” explained Jessica. “It is not the end of the world. What about the 12-word passphrase?”
“I couldn’t find that. I wrote that on another paper. Don’t ask me why I did that, and I must have used that paper to wrap the mug I broke that afternoon,” replied Amy.
“Alright, one more option. Before you go trying out the 256 possibilities,” Jessica continued.
“Really? How?” Amy replied. You can see hope in her eyes.
“You are using Chrome, right? Launch the MetaMask extension and log in to your wallet. If you can access it, then you still can retrieve your private key.” Jessica said, “Do it now. I will walk you through.”
Amy did as Jessica told, however, it showed that Amy had entered the wrong password. “I can’t log in to my wallet. It keeps saying I have entered a wrong password. What should I do now? Will it block me out since I have keyed in the password wrongly so many times?”
“No, it will not bar you but there is no administrator who can unlock your account for you either. But wait, is it the computer you used when you first set up your MetaMask wallet?” Said Jessica.
“I was using my laptop, this is Zack’s.” Amy asked, “Honey, can you grab my laptop? I think I left it in my painting room. Quick!”
Very quickly, Zack came back with Amy’s laptop.
While Amy was setting up her laptop, Zack asked Jessica, “Why does Amy have to access her wallet using her own laptop? That sounds so inconvenient.”
“Matter of fact, MetaMask is only the tool for you to access your account. Let’s say MetaMask is like your laptop. The password for you to unlock your laptop will only work on your laptop. And you can access your webmail services, like Gmail and Yahoo Mail, without entering the email password because you have preset them. Does it make sense to you?” Jessica explained patiently.
“Ok, I am getting it. Go on,” Zack replied.
“But when you want to access your webmail using another device, you will need to enter the webmail’s password in order to log in to it. So, the private key or the 12-word passphrase is like the password to your webmail that lets you access it from another device where the passwords are not preset.”
“Oh, now I got it.” Zack said.
“Yay!” Amy shouted and jumped out of her seat. “Finally, I managed to log in to my wallet. There, my 0.1 ETH. Oh, I am so happy! Though it isn’t worth a lot, it is the result of my first NFT sale.” Amy burst into tears.
“Fantastic! What a relief. The 0.1 ETH you have might not be worth much now, but it might be worth 10 times more in the future if you keep it.” Jessica said, “Now, let’s back up your private key.
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