Hayato’s Favorite Things of 2017

Hayato’s Favorite Things

2017 has been sort of a rough year, but it’s at least been good to me, and good to the tech industry — there are more awesome gadgets out there than ever. I’ve gotten quite a few of them, and I figured I’d share some of my favorites. If you’re looking for a cool gift to put under the tree, or you just want something new for yourself, hopefully this list will help.

Sorry in advance that most of them are a little pricey.

OnePlus 5

No, it’s not the best phone of the year, and now that the OnePlus 5T is out it’s not even the best from its own brand. But it’s the phone that I’ve spent the most time with this year, and — as much as I hate the term — it’s been my daily driver for the majority of 2017.

For under $500, it’s hard to find a better deal than the OnePlus 5. I love OxygenOS, and this phone feels like the perfect size for me (although I wouldn’t mind that fancy 2:1 display on the 5T). If I could change anything, I wish the OnePlus 5 were waterproof like almost every other phone this year, but I really can’t complain otherwise. Since the OnePlus 5 is no longer for sale, I linked the OnePlus 5T, which is slightly better and (sorry) slightly more expensive.

From $499 Buy Now

Peak Design Everyday Backpack

I’m kind of obsessed with backpacks, so naturally I’ve gone through a few of them this year: I got the TimBuk 2 Parkside last holiday season, which was a bit too small and poorly padded; the OnePlus Travel backpack, which I love for general purposes (read: it’s not a camera bag); and the Tylt Energi Pro that, while full of handy compartments and a terrific included battery pack, is entirely too big for me. I’ve known about Peak Design for a little while because of their clever camera gear, and as luck would have it they’ve also got a clever bag. The Everyday Backpack has everything from adjustable shelves inside for smart packing to side zippers to quickly access the things at the bottom of the bag without having to rearrange everything up above. After talking to our own Andrew Martonik about his satisfaction with his, I finally decided to pull the trigger on Black Friday and I have no regrets.

From $259 Buy Now

Sony WH-1000XM2

Thankfully active noise-canceling headphones are one of humanity’s greatest creations, and my ANC cans of choice are Sony’s second-gen 1000X. They’re Bluetooth-capable and last forever on a charge, and they sound great to boot. The noise-canceling is, ahem, jarring at first, but it works so well that even on a plane or in the midde of a noisy city like Manhattan, I can sort of live in a bubble of silence. Oh, and there are some crazy useful gestures like being able to put my hand over the right cup to mute my music and turn on the microphones so I can hear the world around me without having to take the headphones off.

$348 Buy Now

Panasonic Lumix GH5

I’ve been shooting on the same Panasonic GH3 for years, and while it’s been a great 1080p camera, it was time to upgrade. The GH5 has been an absolute dream in the short time I’ve had it so far, but if you’re at all into video then you know that already. This is one of the most popular cameras around. The GH5 is one of the only consumer-grade cameras right now that can shoot 4K at 60 fps, and you can even capture 10-bit color, which is awesome for color grading and chroma keying. Add to that dual SD card slots and a USB-C port for fast transfers over USB 3.1, and this is pretty much the perfect camera for YouTube.

$1997 Buy Now

Samsung T5 SSD

When I bought a new laptop last year, I figured a 256GB SSD would be plenty for me, given that I store almost everything in the cloud. Turns out I was right — I’m barely pushing past 100GB because all I store locally is apps and files synced from Google Drive. But then I got a job editing video. I like to edit off of external storage because I can instantly pick up and work on my desktop. Samsung’s new T5 series SSDs are insanely fast, tiny, and durable; I picked up a 1TB model, and the USB 3.1 transfer speeds are more than enough for me to edit off of.

From $126 Buy Now

Nintendo Switch

Seriously, is there anybody who owns a Switch and doesn’t #$@%ing love it? Between The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey (and the cute and addictive sleeper hit Snipperclips), it’s hard to put the Switch down, but luckily when you do you can just slide it into its dock and start playing on the TV. The Joycons are the first controllers from Nintendo that I actually enjoy using (the GameCube controller is hot garbage, fight me), and I love that it has a USB-C port, since that means I can charge it with my battery pack the same way I would a phone.

$299 Buy Now

Improve your home security with this Netgear Arlo 3-camera package for $300

Home security at a bargain.

Netgear’s 3-HD camera Arlo home security system is down to $299.99 on Amazon. This package is normally around $380. It did drop to $300 for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but it has never been lower than that so this is a good match if you missed those previous deals.

The upgraded version, the Arlo Pro, sells for $160 more for the same number of cameras.

The Arlo system is one of the premiere security systems out there. Android Central breaks down the differences between three of the best connected cameras, including Arlo.

Features include:

• Works with Amazon Alexa/Echo Show/Fire TV – View your live video with a simple voice command
• Patented 100% Wire-Free design for easy placement anywhere
• Night vision cameras work even in the dark
• Motion activated cameras and real-time email or app notifications
• Records and alerts only when motion is detected so no battery power ever goes wasted
• Indoor/ outdoor weatherproof cameras
• App to securely view live video while home or away

If you find three cameras isn’t quite enough, you can always add an individual camera later. Netgear sells the one add-on camera for $137 right now.

See at Amazon

Files Go exits beta, now available for everyone to download

Files Go is available globally for devices running Android 5.0 Lollipop or later.

Last month, Google released a new app called “Files Go” on the Play Store as a tool for helping people in developing markets better manage limited storage space on their phone. Files Go was initially launched as a beta, but now it’s ready for prime time and available for all users to download.

As we learned before, Files Go is a file management app that makes it easy to see how much storage is remaining on a device and quickly delete any unnecessary apps, games, photos, etc. In addition to this, two phones that have Files Go installed can transfer files using Bluetooth to one another without any Internet connection required.

Google says that the average person using Files Go has saved an average of 1GB compared to those not using it.

If you have an Android device running Android 5.0 Lollipop or later, you can download Files Go from the Play Store now.

Google’s new Files Go app offers easy storage management and file transfers

New Honor View 10 is an Honor V10 for the rest of the world

New flagship has a headphone jack, Huawei’s latest processor and a big battery.

At its global launch event in London, Honor has announced that its high-end V10 phone will be launching in Europe early in 2018 with a new name: Honor View 10. The phone was previously announced for the Chinese market in November, boasting top-tier specs.

The Honor View 10 is the brand’s first Android Oreo phone, and its first with Huawei’s new Kirin 970 processor, which enabled AI features in apps thanks to its Neural Processing Unit (NPU) — paired with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Other key specs include a 5.99-inch 18:9 Full HD+ (2160×1080) display, all packed inside a premium glass and metal body.

A fresh take on the core specs of the Huawei Mate 10 Pro.

For imaging, there’s a dual 16MP plus 20MP rear camera setup with AI shooting technology similar to what we’ve seen in the Mate 10 Pro, alongside a 13MP selfie camera that also works for face unlock. Battery capacity is set at a healthy 3,750 mAh, and the new phone features a re-branded version of Huawei’s SuperCharge tech, with 4.5A charging for faster, cooler refills.. Unlike the Mate 10 Pro, Honor also keeps the increasingly rare 3.5mm headphone jack. And Honor has managed to fit its fingerprint scanner around the front of the phone, in the phone’s slim bottom bezel.

While it’s the first time the Honor “V” or “View” brand has been used in western Europe, it’s not the first V-series phone to launch outside China. Earlier in the year, we got the Honor 8 Pro, which was a re-badged version of the Honor V9.

The Honor View 10 be available in blue and black colors, and will sell for €499 and £449 when it launches in Europe and the UK respectively. It’ll also be coming to the United States and Russia, though no local pricing was given for those regions.

Netflix is letting adults in on choose-your-own-adventure shows

Netflix’s choose-your-own adventure TV shows for kids went down so well that it’s planning one for adults, reports Bloomberg. Or was the decision fueled by HBO’s entrance into the field with Steven Soderbergh’s Mosaic series and accompanying smartphone app? Originally unveiled in June, Netflix’s interactive programming lets iOS and TV viewers control parts of the storyline (including up to 13 choices for children’s animation Puss in Boots: Trapped in an Epic Tale).

Less forward-thinking auteurs will likely bemoan the format, which has been kicking around with little success for years. Other “branched narratives” (as Netflix likes to call them) include Buddy Thunderstruck: The Maybe Pile.

And if the new series is successful, who knows? Maybe, Netflix will start adding interactive elements to future seasons of existing “grown-up” shows. Because, who doesn’t want to decide Queen Elizabeth II’s fate in The Crown, right? Wait, that’s a bad example. Targeting who Frank Castle picks off in The Punisher would make more sense. Either way, Netflix has deep enough pockets to go nuts with its new fave fad in 2018.

Via: Bloomberg

Honor squeezed more screen into its budget View 10 flagship

When Huawei sub-brand Honor revealed its new Honor 7X a few weeks ago, we weren’t exactly thrilled. You can only squeeze so many thrills out of a big screen and a mid-range chipset, after all. Thankfully, that wasn’t the only device Honor has been working on. Honor’s deal has always been about delivering solid performance on a budget, but it’s getting a bit more ambitious with the new View 10 (known as the V10 in China). Huawei and Honor are seemingly intent on building a OnePlus-style flagship that won’t break the bank, and if a little hands-on time is anything to go on, the View 10 is already shaping up to be a serious contender.

As you might’ve heard already, the View 10 uses a 5.99-inch LCD screen that takes up almost all of the room on the phone’s face. In keeping with devices like the OnePlus 5T — which the View 10 is set to directly compete with — the 18:9 “FullView” screen is taller and narrower than ones seen in earlier Honor devices. The company hasn’t rid the phone of bezels entirely, but they’re slim enough that the phone still feels easy to use with just one hand. The View 10’s all-metal body feels surprisingly light, too, considering there’s a 3,750mAh battery wedged inside. In typical Honor fashion, though, the View 10’s design is pretty bland. There’s nothing wrong with it, per se, as long as you weren’t hoping for some Honor Magic-esque flair.

What little extra space remains was put to good use, though: unlike the recently announced Honor 7X, there’s a front-mounted fingerprint sensor sitting right beneath the display, and there was enough room left over to squeeze in a standard headphone jack. And while other Android OEMs have been happy to ditch expandable memory options, the View 10 takes microSD cards as large as 256GB — not too shabby, especially when you consider the device will be available with up to 128GB of onboard storage.

That’s all fine, but let’s talk power. Like the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro before it, Honor’s View 10 uses one of Huawei’s Kirin 970 chipsets — you know, the one with the neural processing unit. Huawei is still bullish on the idea of weaving AI throughout the smartphone experience, and even though we weren’t amazed by the chip’s machine-learning chops in the Mate 10, getting that kind of power and potential in a more affordable body is something to celebrate. Now we just need developers building software that really takes advantage of that NPU. The 970 is a remarkably snappy chipset in its own right, though, especially if you spring for the model with 6GB of RAM (subject to availability, naturally).

Meanwhile, the dual camera around back should seem familiar to long-time Huawei fans. The lack of Leica branding is pretty conspicuous here, but no matter: the View 10 once again pairs a standard 16-megapixel color camera with a 20-megapixel monochrome camera. The few test shots we took looked pleasant enough (especially those captured with the monochrome sensor), but we’re a little concerned by the way both cameras jut out of the View 10’s back. If you didn’t mind the iPhone’s camera humps, this won’t be too much to worry about, but don’t forget: the Honor 9’s dual camera sat flush with the phone’s body.

Unfortunately, the unit we played with was running some seriously non-final software, so not everything worked the way we had hoped. The View 10 runs a version of Android Oreo that has been painted over with Huawei’s EMUI interface, and while it was generally quite snappy during our play session, we did notice a few occasional hiccups. Also, you won’t find Huawei’s cheeky TrueDepth Camera clone here; the View 10 will only come with a more conventional face unlock feature, but that won’t arrive until a future OTA update. There weren’t any games loaded onto our demo unit, either, so the included Gaming mode — which blocks notifications and allows for screen recording while in the midst of the action — was also off-limits.

Honor hasn’t locked down global pricing and availability yet, and for once, we’re eagerly awaiting the details. We do have some of the broad strokes, though: the View 10 will land in the US in the first half of 2018, and it should cost around $500 when it does. That’s pretty pricey for an Honor device, but it’s also safe to say the View 10 is a pretty unusual — and powerful — proposition for a brand that has mostly played in safe in the States.

Amazon offers same-day delivery on handmade goods

If you’re struggling with holiday shopping, Amazon is swooping in to make things a little easier. Amazon Handmade, which is the online retail giant’s destination for handmade goods and crafts, is now offering Prime Now delivery. This means that shoppers in certain metro areas can receive this items via one- and two-hour delivery just in time for the holidays.

This service isn’t available nationwide, but holiday shoppers in Austin, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Portland, Raleigh, San Diego, the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle can take advantage of Amazon Handmade’s fast shipping. This means that shoppers can place last-minute gift orders on Christmas Eve and still receive their items in time for the holiday.

Amazon launched Handmade two years ago, setting Etsy squarely in its sights. The addition of Prime Now makes it tough to beat if you’re looking online for thoughtful and unique gifts; Etsy’s shipping is dependent on merchants, and it can be a mixed bag in terms of when you receive the items you purchase. It will be interesting to see whether Amazon extends the Handmade/Prime Now combination past the holiday season, as it’s currently a pilot program.

Source: Business Wire

Turning indie horror hit ‘Neverending Nightmares’ into a manga

She stands in front of you, clutching a teddy bear to her chest. She can’t be older than 8, with long, straight black hair and a frilled dress. You don’t know her name, but she’s smiling warmly. And then, suddenly, she isn’t: Her doe eyes widen, white and afraid. Her mouth gapes and blood drips past her lips. You follow her gaze down — a knife protrudes from her stomach, staining her dress bright red, blood dribbling into her socks and Mary Janes. A knife that your hands are grasping tightly.

This is how the video game Neverending Nightmares begins, and it’s also the first scene in a manga of the same name that debuted last week. As a game, Neverending Nightmares is a chilling, powerful peek into the darkest thoughts of a person struggling with depression and intrusive thoughts. The protagonist, Thomas, is trapped in a hellscape loop, repeatedly waking up only to realize he’s still in a terrible nightmare: Headless corpses are piled against black-and-white walls; bodies hang from meat hooks in a claustrophobic cell; Thomas pulls a vein from his wrist like a stray thread.

So far, the manga is just as brazen in its depiction of suffering and death. It’s done in the same Edward Gorey-esque art style, filled with scratchy black lines and explosions of red highlighting gruesome scenes of disembowelment, murder and torture. For creator Matt Gilgenbach, these scenes are the heart of Neverending Nightmares, though they’re not gory for the sake of gore. They serve a profound purpose as he attempts to demonstrate the depth of his own depressive thoughts.

Neverending Nightmares spawned from a dark period in Gilgenbach’s life, as described to Joystiq (now Engadget) in 2014: His game, Retrograde, had just bombed and he was financially downtrodden. He slipped into depression, something he’d faced earlier in his life. His mind began to fill with images of self-inflicted violence and he longed for an outlet to express the overwhelming nature of these thoughts.

“When I started thinking about how to represent my obsessive compulsive disorder, one of the main things I struggled with are intrusive thoughts, violent thoughts of self-harm,” Gilgenbach says. “These were very upsetting, and as soon as I became comfortable with a particular image, my mind would dream up an even more intense and awful image that would make me miserable. I thought that Neverending Nightmares would be a great opportunity to bring those to life.”

Gilgenbach was onto something there. Neverending Nightmares premiered on PC in 2014 and it’s still relevant today, picking up new players and expanding to fresh platforms. Alongside the launch of the manga last week, Neverending Nightmares landed on Android and iOS with a sticker price of $4. The game is now available on Steam, PlayStation 4, Vita and mobile devices.

The prologue of Neverending Nightmares

Pixiv

The prologue and first chapter of the manga are available now, for free, on Japanese artist forum Pixiv. The remaining eight chapters — each readable in English, Japanese and simplified Chinese — will roll out once a month through July, also for free.

Pixiv played a big role in making the manga happen. Gilgenbach hadn’t seriously considered transforming his game into a comic book or any other medium, but once Neverending Nightmares hit PlayStation Network in Japan, it picked up a lot of interest on Pixiv. The company reached out to Gilgenbach with an offer to license his IP and create a manga.

“One of the most exciting things about the manga is that I can reach a different audience that might not be interested in the game,” Gilgenbach says. “When I met with Pixiv early on, I stressed to them how important of an IP to me this was and how I wanted to ensure it stayed true to the theme of the original work. They were very receptive to this and worked with me on keeping the same theme as the game.”

Developing the manga is a collaborative process: Gilgenbach doesn’t have any experience in writing Japanese comic books himself, so he and Pixiv worked with a specialist on the script. The story itself, however, resides in Pixiv’s hands.

“I feel that they have made the manga a bit faster paced, and added more gore and horror to the beginning of the work,” Gilgenbach says. “It definitely changes the feeling, but I think it really works well for the medium. I get chills reading the manga, so I think they pulled off the horror effectively.”

Gilgenbach is surprised to still be working on Neverending Nightmares after all these years. Its longevity is notable in the crowded independent marketplace to begin with, but it’s especially impressive considering the game’s dark subject matter and heaps of gore.

“I didn’t expect it to continue to have interest at this point,” Gilgenbach says. “I think because I set out to do something different and recreate my personal journey with mental illness thematically, it really resonates with a fanbase that is continuing to grow through word of mouth.”

And, now, word of manga.

Instagram can now automatically archive your Stories

Last week, The Next Web reported on a bunch of new features Instagram was reportedly testing out and today, the platform is giving users two new ways to manage Stories. The first is the rumored Story archive. Now, Instagram will automatically save your Stories after their 24 hours are up and they’ll exist in a separate archive section of your profile. You’ll be able to rewatch Stories, add them to posts or add them to a new Story. And if you decide you don’t want those Stories sticking around, you can turn off auto-archiving whenever you want.

Your archived Stories can also be used in the second new addition to Instagram. Underneath the bio in your profile, there will now be a section called Stories Highlights. They’re collections of previously shared Stories that will stay posted to your profile for as long as you want them there and you can have as many of them as you want. To make one, tap the “New” circle underneath your bio and select any stories you want to add from your new archive. You’ll then pick a cover image and name the Highlight and then it’s there for any of your followers to see at any time. To edit or delete them, just tap and hold.

Both features are rolling out now.

Image: Instagram

Source: Instagram

My $200,000 bitcoin odyssey

This was not what I expected to be doing with my October. But there I was, on a flight to Hong Kong, hoping I would be able to retrieve $200,000 worth of bitcoin from a broken laptop.

Four years ago, I was living in Hong Kong when a fellow journalist named Mike* and I decided to invest in bitcoin. I bought four while Mike went in for 40; I spent about $2,000 while he put in $15,000. At the time, it seemed super speculative, but over the years, bitcoin surged and Mike seemed downright prescient. I had since relocated to Los Angeles and had been texting Mike about the 2,000 percent rise in our investment.

*Name changed for anonymity.

Strangely, I wasn’t getting much of a response from him. He had 10 times as many bitcoins as I did — shouldn’t he at least have been excited? Finally, when the price of one bitcoin broke $4,000 this summer, I sent him this message: “You do still have those bitcoins right?” That’s when he broke it to me: “Maybe not …”

Here’s what happened: At some point in 2013, Mike had rightfully become concerned about security. He initially kept his coins in an exchange called LocalBitcoins. Exchanges are commonly used to buy and sell cryptocurrency, but you shouldn’t keep your coins there. The most infamous bitcoin scandal to date was when Mt. Gox, an exchange based in Japan, lost 850,000 of its users’ bitcoins.

Exchanges can also suddenly close, as some did in China this year when the Chinese government suddenly made them illegal. Any serious cryptocurrency investor will tell you that your coins are best kept in “cold storage” (an offline hardware wallet). That’s what I’d done with mine, but Mike hadn’t gone that far three years ago when he started thinking about security. Instead, he set up a software wallet. It was a good step, but he would soon learn, it was not foolproof.

Today, there are many sophisticated and intuitive wallet options, but choices were narrower in 2013. Mike used MultiBit, which was popular at the time but has since been discontinued due to numerous flaws.

It’s obvious MultiBit was written in a hurry: The interface is counterintuitive, presenting you with a prominent button that says “create wallet” that allows you to generate new wallets inside the software. Most users only need one wallet, but MultiBit practically demands that you set up multiple. On top of this, it allows you to add multiple passwords to each wallet, even though these aren’t required. With only a few minutes of clicking, you could create dozens of wallets, each with dozens of passwords. In short, it has a lot of room for error.

In March 2014, on an unseasonably sweaty night in Hong Kong, Mike created a new wallet on Multibit, moved his 40 bitcoins into it and then added a password. In the infinite wisdom of the MultiBit programmers, there was no option to double-confirm the password. Hope you typed it in right! The problem was, Mike knew he hadn’t. He tried what he thought was the password, and it was rejected. Again and again he was bounced. His finger had slipped when he entered the password, he was sure of it — there was an extra keystroke somewhere. But which key, and where?

Since Mike was in the bitcoin game for the long haul, he moved on after a week or two of trying and retrying his password. The years ticked by, and the bitcoin price languished for between $200 and 400, so it didn’t feel urgent. He figured that there would be a solution one day, and so he put his 2007 MacBook with his MulitBit wallet in a safe corner of his office, where it quietly died from a motherboard failure.

Mike called me earlier this year. “I have to tell you the truth, and this is a major mental block for me, but I may have totally lost my bitcoins.” He told me about the now dead laptop and the MultiBit fiasco. He spoke like he was in a confessional, cowed with shame and begging for forgiveness. The price of bitcoin at that time put Mike’s loss at about $180,000 and rising. He told me he was planning to fly to the offices of KeepKey, the new owners of the legacy MultiBit products, and … pray maybe? I told him to wait.

As I listened to his problem, I got it into my head that I could fix this for him, even though I wasn’t sure how. I knew a fair bit about how bitcoin wallets work, but I was certainly no expert. I guess I liked the tantalizing challenge — after all, bitcoin was skyrocketing, and we were approaching $200,000 of real stakes here. In short, it was worth a shot.

Getting the hard drive from his old MacBook would be easy, just a matter of plugging the drive into a new computer. The challenge was the MultiBit side of things. I tracked down an old version of the now discontinued software and discovered that there were multiple ways to restore wallets using MultiBit. The software generates encrypted backups for each wallet, and it also encrypts separate backups of the private keys. The entire program and all wallets inside of it could also be restored from the seed words, but Mike had, of course, lost those too.

It soon became clear that we had, at best, a 50 percent chance of success: We could either decrypt a wallet backup or a key backup. To do either, we’d have to use a password that Mike would have to remember. I broke the news to him, and he offered to pay me a percentage of whatever we could recover. Although I could try to restore his wallet remotely, he wanted me to come and sit there with him. This was as much a personal failure as an IT failure, and he needed someone to share the experience with.

I arrived in Hong Kong at the beginning of the Mid-Autumn Festival. This is the full moon festival, celebrating the fall solstice. In Hong Kong, this means several days of public holiday.

First things first, we had a technician from one of Hong Kong’s bustling computer malls transfer the data off the dead hard drive — we got him on his last day before the holiday. Retrieving the data was an easy enough operation. Soon, we were looking at the MultiBit backup files on my computer: So far, so good.

It’s helpful here to understand what a bitcoin actually is. The best explanation I’ve heard is metaphorical: Money began as a physical object, and then it shifted to become your identity (i.e., your name on your bank account). But cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are virtual objects, which means they exist in the digital space, not tied to anyone’s identity.

Like a digital dollar bill, a bitcoin can be traded, stolen or lost. But this is still just a symbolic representation of the actual fact: A bitcoin is really just a cryptographically locked address on the blockchain, so rather than having a bitcoin “on” your computer, what you actually have is the private key that can unlock a bitcoin’s location on the blockchain. It was that key that we were searching for in Mike’s mess of MultiBit folders.

Now that we had the backup files, it was time to get to unlocking. Mike had seemingly created half a dozen or so different wallets when he was securing his bitcoins — no doubt, a result of the software’s baffling interface. The good ol’ process of elimination would narrow this down to the wallet that was the ultimate destination for the bitcoin. We loaded up the first wallet file and entered the password Mike had intended to type all of those years ago, and it unlocked. That was a good sign: It meant we knew the password Mike remembered actually worked with at least some wallets — just not, perhaps, the only one that mattered. The wallet started syncing to the blockchain.

The blockchain is often described as a decentralized public ledger. In practical terms, that means it’s a long list of every transaction that has ever occurred. It’s “decentralized” because every transaction is confirmed via a math problem solved by computers set up as “miners.” Updating the chain from years ago would take time — about 80 minutes in our case. The full moon was rising in Hong Kong, and we ate Thai food, anxiously waiting for the blockchain to sync.

Each time we saw the $200,000 worth of coins arrive on Nov. 20th, 2013, and vanish on March 20th, 2014.

We watched as the wallet displayed 40 bitcoins arriving on Nov. 20th, 2013. It also displayed the current value: $200,000.

This looked like success, but I urged caution: The chain was still four years behind present day. And sure enough, when March 20th, 2014, rolled around, the balance in the wallet dropped to $0 as all the bitcoins were transferred out.

We went through four or five other wallets, waiting more than an hour for the blockchain to sync to each one, and each time we saw the $200,000 worth of coins arrive on Nov. 20th, 2013, and vanish on March 20th, 2014. At some point it stopped being tragic and started becoming darkly comical.

At 1 AM, we checked another wallet. This time, March 20th, 2014, passed, and the coins remained. We waited an agonizing additional half hour for the blockchain to finish syncing, and … the balance stayed. We had found what we were looking for.

All that was left was to transfer the coins out of this mess and into a modern wallet (we decided on using Exodus, which is easy to use, simple and secure). But the transfer asked for another password. Remember, MultiBit lets you add additional passwords to wallets. This is what Mike had done on that sweaty night back in 2014. We tried the password we knew, and … wrong. We tried again and again, carefully calling out each character as we entered it. Wrong, wrong, wrong. We had found ourselves on the bad side of the fifty-fifty.

Why does MultiBit encourage you to use multiple passwords? Why doesn’t it at least ask you to confirm your password before saving it? So many questions, shouted into the obsolete software void.

Mike, despairing, wanted to give up, but I hadn’t flown halfway around the world for nothing. We opened a spreadsheet and started logging different permutations of the password, trying to brute-force our way through his keystroke error. But after 50 attempts, it seemed like a Sisyphean task. MultiBit accepts all characters, cases, symbols and spaces as valid password characters — the number of potential solutions were staggering. We turned the air conditioning off in Mike’s apartment in an attempt to recreate the “sweaty” temperatures Mike recalled from the fateful night, but nothing worked.

We checked all of his email correspondence from around that date. We found that, teasingly, he had emailed himself three times the day after March 20th about his MultiBit fuckup, but each email was useless, containing irrelevant information Mike thought was important. Mike was a journalist: Perhaps he wrote down password possibilities in a notebook when it was fresh in his mind? But as soon as I asked that question, we found a 2014 Google Chat he had with me five days after the fiasco: In it, Mike told me he was feeling flustered and did some cleaning and threw out all of his notebooks.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

We then resigned ourselves to a new eternal hobby: We figured we’d be trying out various password combinations for as long as we lived, and if the value of bitcoin continued to rise, then we’d be all the more determined to crack this puzzle. Even in my cloud of optimism, this was clearly a recipe for Lovecraftian madness.

I began looking into writing a program that could brute-force permutations of the password, and Mike was becoming increasingly Zen-like. He sat on his sofa, stewing over the nature of the loss, while I turned to sift through his backup files. Suddenly, I was struck with an idea: The additional password that Mike created applied to the wallet itself, but perhaps it didn’t apply to the key backup file.

He sat on his sofa, stewing over the nature of the loss, while I turned to sift through his backup files.

I created a new wallet in MultiBit, loaded the key file and unlocked it with the password that we knew worked. As Mike rambled therapeutically about the fleeting nature of money, hopes, dreams, our lives and this very world, I watched as the blockchain synced. Nov. 20th, 2013, rolled around, and $200,000 showed up, as expected. Then March 20th rolled around, and … the balance stayed.

Interesting. I went to the “send” tab, where we had just spent five hours banging our head against the wrong password rock only to discover that the “send” button was active now, glowing and ready to click — no password required. This meant that I could click it and …

Holy bejesus, it worked.

The balance dropped to zero as the transaction was broadcast to the blockchain, and my heart rate spiked. This meant that, as soon as the transaction was confirmed, we would have control of these bitcoins in a new secure wallet.

You typically need two confirmations before a transaction clears to most wallets or exchanges, but you really want seven, which is considered irreversible. After 15 minutes, there were no confirmations. An hour passed. We still had zero confirmations.

We had just stumbled upon another reason that MultiBit is irretrievably broken software: The transaction fee is hard-coded at a miniscule amount. Transactions on the blockchain are confirmed by miners in exchange for a small cut — but in the three years since this wallet was first written, fees have climbed a magnitude over what was hard-coded into MultiBit. This meant that our fee was pathetically small and the transaction could be left to languish in the mempool (the list of pending transactions) forever. No miner would ever see it, let alone confirm it.

Hong Kong is beautiful at night, especially during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Everyone is at home or on vacation, and the streets are empty — and yet, the city does not feel turned off. It’s idling, waiting to start again. That night, the moon was the brightest and biggest it would be that year. And something unexpected happened in the strange moonlight.

The next morning, I checked the blockchain explorer to find that our transaction had five confirmations. How?! Mike and I rushed to a café to wait for the final two confirmations. As we waited, I furiously Googled and discovered that the mempool could get pretty low sometimes during periods of low transactions, such as … the Mid-Autumn Festival in China, where most bitcoin miners are located.

Eventually, the confirmations rolled in. By luck, the blockchain had delivered. In a weird way, Hong Kong, and the Mid-Autumn Festival, had delivered. It was a quiet morning in the cafe, but for a moment, the peace was broken by two idiots, cheering and high-fiving in front of a laptop.

In the darkest moments of that night with Mike, it seemed absurd that this encrypted address on a digital ledger mattered so much. But it’s no less absurd than the bills in my wallet or the figures in my bank account. Our economy is built on mutual belief and hope.

If something goes wrong in the traditional economy, there’s supposed to be someone there to help you. A hotline. A customer service rep. A support ticket. But with bitcoin, there was no institution to save us. We had to do that ourselves. People like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon ridicule cryptocurrencies, dismissing bitcoin as a scam, a Ponzi scheme or a bubble. But he is the institution, after all. He wants a world where we need a JPMorgan Chase to manage our money.

Wealth disparity is at record levels and the ultrarich have cornered the market on every asset class, but with bitcoin, an entirely new economy has sprung into existence. That’s the pitch for decentralized cryptocurrencies: They offer hope that there might be another, fairer way of doing things.

Just make sure you secure your hope properly.

Images: Steve Fung (inline Hong Kong); Mat Smith (plane wing)