I was looking forward to the trip as I had just recovered from a fracture that kept me bed-ridden for two months. After ten hours of driving I made my first stop at a border town to Laos, my intended destination.

The next morning I was ready to boot up my little notebook computer when I noticed a huge bulge – part of the frame and the keyboard had lifted, something I had never seen before. Apparently, when Li-ion batteries go bad gases build up inside and it is obviously not safe to use them – or to be near them! The number one reason for a shortened battery life is heat and living in a tropical environment obviously fastened the decline and killed the battery in about 2 years of daily use.

I finally found a shop that could replace the battery, but for some reason there were still problems with charging (incompatible battery) and they needed my password for booting up my windows computer to check for charging. They took the computer yet to another shop to solve the issue and when it was finally all resolved I realized I got a bit nervous as they could have easily stolen my wallet.dat file from my qt-wallet that held my Syscoin masternode stake of 100K coins! QT-wallet is the standard bitcoin wallet and as Syscoin is merged-mined with Bitcoin it utilizes the same code base.

My wallet was obviously protected by a strong randomly generated password, but would that be enough? According to https://medium.com/@drgutteridge/whats-the-deal-with-encryption-strength-is-128-bit-encryption-enough-or-do-you-need-more-3338b53f1e3d it would appear i was safe for the next 25+ yrs as qt-wallets are based on a 256 bit encryption keys. (Obviously, installing a key logger would be a shortcut to get to my coins, but that was something i could more easily defeat).

In the end I realized it was probably more a mental health issue than a substantial risk that anybody would spend unknown amount of time and money trying to hack my wallet. They would need to employ serious computing power for a long time in order to hack it. Yet, would I be continuously ruminating about this? Probably!

The only downside from moving my coins to a new address was to lose my built up masternode seniority over the past 3 months since the last hardfork. In the case of Syscoin, following the first year of operation, the reward increases 35% and after 2.5 years of operation, the reward increases 100% from the base reward of about 25.9 Syscoins daily. https://medium.com/@syscoin/syscoin-4-0-rewards-specifications-a3dc01d85adf

Market price for Syscoin is currently exceptionally low and the loss of my coins at the current prices would not be that substantial - but market sentiment can and will change quickly!



In the end, I decided to move my coins to a newly generated address and when my new node showed 'enabled', I felt relief! Never mind losing a few months of seniority!



I am still wondering how others would have dealt with the same situation!



Looking forward to some feedback! Thanks :)