The Bitcoin Ride of a Lifetime 🎢

In February this year, I convinced a longtime friend to park some of his money in bitcoin. I told him I was also going to start stacking more again, using a different exchange Relai.

He comes over to my house, I explain why it’s important to keep your money off exchanges, bla blah blah—but what I think really got him onboard was the idea of using my laser engraver to carve some fancy seed plates.

So we transfer the bitcoin into our Relai wallets and carve two backup plates each. We then swap one plate, so now we both have a backup of each other’s wallet.

Fast-forward to now. I’m traveling and my phone was wiped before I left.

Today, at 2 in the morning for me or 10 am back home my friend opens the Relai app and it says:

Balance: 0
All funds moved three days ago.

He freaks out and calls me.

I try to calm him down while downloading and reinstalling the Relai app so I can log in and check my end.

I check…

Balance: 0

oke, that is verry verry verry not good.

My funds were transferred five days ago, around 4 in the morning my time.

Guess what?

I was sleeping.

I’m trying to talk to customer support and my friend at the same time, but when customer support greets me with the helpful information that:

“Bitcoin transactions are non-reversible.”

…I kinda lose my cool.

Cause… duh.

After calming my friend down, I tell him I’ll cover his losses, but that I need to get some sleep and will look into it in the morning since its getting late.

Which is a lie not the covering of losses but the sleep, because who the fuck can sleep when that just happened?

So my first thoughts are:

• Bad cryptography because it only supports 12 words?
• App compromise?
• Somebody got access to the seed plates?

Whatever it was it must have been a unicorn of an event for us both to have gotten compromised at around the same time.

So what the hell happened?

Well…

Five days ago, my friend wanted to try a Lightning wallet for the first time. He decided to move a couple hundred bucks from his bitcoin stack into the wallet.

Then, three days ago, he wanted to top up said wallet.

He loaded a seed phrase into BlueWallet—just like the tutorial told him—and transferred some sats to the Lightning wallet, just like he had done five days earlier.

But guess what? WRONG SEED PHRASE

He used mine 😂

This is also a part of the timeline that only emerged later, because my friend was initially too afraid to tell since he thought he might have fucked up there somehow.

The Relai part

So now back to the Relai thing.

Relai only monitors the derivation path:

m/84'/0'/0'/0/0

This is the first native SegWit receiving address.

When you make a transaction from an imported seed in BlueWallet, the remaining funds can be moved to a change address.

Relai doesn’t monitor that address, so the balance disappears from the Relai app—even though the bitcoin is still safely sitting there.

After 14 hours, and finally getting access to the seed phrase, I was able to confirm it:

😅 No funds lost. Just some newly acquired grey hairs.