Ask HN: Lost $400k USD in a deleted email, how contact a Gmail engineer?

Full email:

Ethereum Ether Sale Backup Wallet

You are about to make an ether purchase. Please keep the attached wallet file safe. It will serve as a cryptographic receipt of your purchase, along with your password.

The password you created and entered on the sale site is the key to your ether so please do not forget it. And please note: there are no mechanisms in place that will enable the Ethereum team to help you recover a lost password. Once it is lost, your purchased ether will be permanently inaccessible.

Please ensure that a main copy and one or more backup copies of this wallet file are stored separately and securely. If you lose access to all copies of your wallet, you will not be able to access your purchased ether and it is not possible for the Ethereum team to reconstruct a lost wallet.

Once you have saved the wallet file from this email to your computer and securely stored multiple copies of it in different locations, you should expunge this email (and any copies of it) from your email system to further ensure that no unauthorized person gains access to your wallet and attempts to crack the password that locks it.

Once the official client is launched with the blockchain going operational (projected to be Winter 2014-2015) you will be able to import the private key stored in the wallet file and start using your ether on the network. And please note that Ether purchased in this sale is not usable on our proof of concept series clients. They use test-ether.

He didn't "lose" 400k. He lost whatever was in the presale and he learned a really valuable lesson. He'll never forget it.

When the worst thing to complain about is an altcoin investment gone bad, you are doing pretty well in life. It's not about empathy, it's about perspective, and the OP is gonna need the latter to get past it.

So since there are many eyes here, I'd like to hijack a little. I have some old wallet files from a year ago - armory_xxx_encrypt.wallet, bitcoinwallet.dat, dogecoinwallet.dat and a key backup PFX. I haven't looked at cryptocurrencies since, and so don't even know what tool I'd use to check the value of these wallets. Can anyone advise?

The same exact thing happened to me. I definitely would have cashed out when bitcoin peaked at $14, assuming I didn't lose them all in the Mt. Gox boondoggle or something.

I always say it's like the person who left their baseball cards at their mothers house, and then learned 30 years later that one was worth $100k or something. They talk about the money they could have had if their mother hadn't thrown our their cards.

The thing is that if you had valued them at all, then you wouldn't have left them in the basement at your mother's house.

Edit: Actually, as a more recent point, I also received a bunch of Beanie Babies when I was a kid. I had a set of 1st gen dinosaurs that ended up being incredibly valuable. Of course they were toys, and I had chewed on them, because I chewed on everything when I was very young. The set is still really valuable, with sold listings in the hundreds of dollars on eBay to this day.

It's kind of ridiculous to think "What if I hadn't chewed on them." You'll never enjoy anything if you don't use it because it might be valuable. That's a great way to become a neurotic hoarder.