I just learned why test transactions are REALLY important when setting up cold storage (lost coins)

I’m 7 months into my journey and finally decided to get cold storage. I’ve always heard the advice, “always send a small transaction first before sending the full stack.” Let me tell you, there’s a reason people say that.

I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I did wrong but here’s what happened:

I set up cold storage (Jade), and a mobile wallet attached to it. Sent a test transaction, then decided to make sure I could send from the wallet back to the exchange to make sure everything worked. It did. It worked fine.

Then, as an extra precaution, I factory reset my cold storage device to make sure I could recover it with my written backups. After doing that, I tried reconnecting to the same wallet and approving a send of the rest back to the exchange. But I just kept getting error messages. It wouldn’t approve or send the bitcoin.

I tried exporting the wallet to three other wallet apps and they all show 0 bitcoin. So I’m guessing when I recovered my wallet using the seed phrase and the 25th word passphrase, I must’ve typed something wrong. Probably just one letter or number off in the 25th word, which created a totally different wallet.

So now the original wallet I used for the test transaction is basically lost unless I somehow guess the exact 25th word. I might’ve just donated 5 bucks to the bitcoin network and lowered the total supply forever. You’re welcome.