How I Lost $1.6 Million in Bitcoin in 8 Minutes

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On July 31, Toronto-based entrepreneur and personal trainer Jonathan Goodman, 40, discovered that he’d lost $1.6 million in a major Bitcoin hack. The thieves targeted offline-password devices made by the Canadian company Coinkite and stole roughly $140 million worth of Bitcoin across 7,300 accounts. Goodman, author of Unhinged Habits, spoke with TLDR’s Jenna Benchetrit about the experience.

I grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Canada. My dad’s an engineer, and my mom’s a teacher. My relationship to money growing up was: you’re a professional, you have a salary, you invest it prudently, and you can be reasonably assured that you’re going to be taken care of.

I first looked at crypto in 2017, after my personal-training business had taken off. But the risk profile wasn’t what I was looking for, so I didn’t buy any. A few years later, it seemed like the risks had evolved enough that it made sense to buy, so I started putting 10% to 15% of my company’s excess profits into Bitcoin. Over a year and a half, I put in over a million dollars, and my holdings grew to $3 million at one point.

Around this time, I bought a hardware device called a Coldcard wallet, made by Coinkite. It generated and stored a complicated offline password that I used to access my Bitcoin on the public digital ledger. That kept my Bitcoin safe, in theory, because you would need the physical hardware to access the password.