Fun Fact

Fun Facts about me

The Reich Hebrew Academy

This week, my family and I were honored by my childhood school for the work we’ve done over the years to give back to the school and to the community.

I gave a speech and made another commitment.

Both are below…

**** The speech ****

Next week is Passover. 

It’s a time in the Jewish tradition when we talk about how we escaped bondage, oppression, and persecution and were freed from slavery in Egypt. 

Growing up every year, when my grandparents were around, we would go to their house for this holiday. I would sit next to my grandfather at the head of the table, watching him tell the story about how, we, as Jews, were freed from slavery. 

As some of you may know, my grandparents were Holocaust survivors. And like the Jews from Egypt, my grandparents managed to survive their own Pharoah and discover freedom on a small farm in Toms River, New Jersey. 

To sit next to my grandfather, and listen to him talk about Jews being persecuted and freed, thousands of years ago, was quite surreal to me.

Even in my eulogy about him, I remember remarking about how these moments felt like a window into the past, through his eyes and his narration of the Sedar, with his Yiddish accent.

At a young age, I could appreciate this relationship between Passover and the Holocaust. The Hebrew Academy certainly had a role to play in helping me understand these chapters of our past.

But I remember one year in particular.

I was sitting at the head of the table and my grandfather had a few more cups of wine than usual.

Out of nowhere, for the very first time in my life, he began to tell me stories about his experiences during the Holocaust. 


These weren’t stories about the six million Jews. 

These were stories about Sam. About his friends. About his siblings. About his parents. About his family. 

About my family. 

One story he told me was about the time when he was a prisoner of war, he went without eating his bread rations for a week, so he could sell those rations to enemy soldiers and bribe his way out of the camp to work as a carpenter, which he was not. 

You could imagine the irony of listening to him tell me about the importance of bread and how it saved his life while starting at a matzah plate in the middle of the Sedar table.

These stories, and others like it that night were the first time that I really internalized the fact that he lost everything, yet, we were here.  

We were free. 

With everything. 

We had opportunities he never had. 

We have opportunities 6 million people, and their children and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren never had. 

This is something I think about every single day of my life. 

בְּכָל דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת עַצְמוֹ כְּאִלוּ הוּא יֶָָצֶָא מִמִּצְרַָים

“In every generation, every individual must feel as if he personally had come out of Egypt”

This visceral understanding gives me perspective and encourages me to make the most of this gift that each one of us has. 

The gift of life.

Back at the Passover table, and after he shared his war stories, he then proceeded to give his young grandson some life lessons. 


They were simple.

Work hard and go to school. Get a good education.

I think he understood that our kids are our future and that his kids and grandkids were his future. 

I think he also understood how education played a central role in it all, especially when he himself was not able to pursue it due to the war. 

This is something, as a parent myself, I now really understand but more importantly, it’s something I feel and connect with every time I look at my own kids, Michaela and Brayden. 

It’s something my parents understood too when they sent me to school at The Hebrew Academy.

My grandparents and parents knew that if that little boy at the Sedar table worked hard in life and got a good education, he might be ok. And maybe, just maybe, he could help pay it forward and do the same for his family and for others.

And here we are. 


I’ve worked hard, had a great upbringing thanks to my parents and The Hebrew Academy, had a little success and a lot of luck, and now recognize that it’s my turn to help ensure our Jewish family carries on for future generations. 

That is why, tonight, I am excited to honor the memory of my grandparents, Sam and Betty, by rededicating my childhood school, formerly the Solomon Schechter Day School and currently The Hebrew Academy. 

Moving forward, it will forever be known as “The Reich Hebrew Academy”

I can truly think of no better way to express my love and appreciation for my grandparents and their legacy.

Today more than ever, this is especially important with the backdrop of what’s happening in Ukraine. Once again, people are fleeing Europe to save their lives as my grandparents did from their small towns in Poland years ago, which are now part of Ukraine.

This commitment ensures that my generation and future generations will be afforded the same opportunities that were afforded to me. Opportunities that were not afforded to my grandparents and millions of others. 

So here’s my ask to all of you…

Please consider joining me and my family, Joe and Maxine Macnow, and recent others like David and Vanessa Wise, Randy and Laurie Pearlman, in stepping up in a big way and helping ensure this school gets built. 

Joe, Maxine, and Yoti told me they had a dream about this project. As an entrepreneur, I too love to live in the clouds and try to invent the future.


And their dream is an amazing one where the past present and future exist concurrently. It’s an exciting vision and we would not be here without them.

Joe, Maxine, Yoti, thank you. 

So please, help us make it a reality and help us ensure the path to the future is secured for our kids and future generations.


And now, I’d like to introduce you to the funnier, better-looking Reich, my brother Jeremy. 

Thank you.

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I had $2 million dollars in crypto locked on a wallet

Yes, I had $2 million dollars locked away on a crypto-hard wallet that I couldn’t access because of a forgotten password.

But let’s start from the beginning…

In 2013 I started to learn everything I could about the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. It was clear that a new “internet of money” was being born.

I started reading, writing, buying, and experimenting with the world of Bitcoin and everything around it. I almost started a company with the premise of letting people more easily buy and sell Bitcoin. I’ll add that one to the woulda, coulda, shouda list.

As we now all know, a few years later the ecosystem started to pick up. More people were getting involved, including some of my friends. 

One of those friends had been making a living as a professional poker player. Instead of only trading cards and chips on digital poker tables, he now also started to trade various cryptocurrencies on a number of exchanges. 

I was however busy with my day job building startups and didn’t have time anymore to focus on the crypto world. But, I still wanted to get in early on some of the emerging, off-the-beaten-path technologies that most people hadn’t heard about yet.

So in 2018, my friend Jesse and I were chatting and decided we should make a larger, more concentrated bet on an alternative coin. I would transfer him the money and he would buy and hold the coins for us. 

And that’s exactly what we did.

On January 18, 2018, I sent my friend 2 BTC, which at the time was about $12,500/BTC. And with my 2 BTC, and his 2 BTC, together, we bought about $50,000 of a different coin called Theta at about $0.21 per token. This seemed a bit crazy at the time since the logical, sensible part of our brains told us we were basically lighting money on fire. 

This is what lighting money on fire looks like.

“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago” – Warren Buffet

That was my plan. 

To buy and hold, and not look at it for a very long time.

A few weeks go by…

We get a notice from the exchange where we had purchased and been storing our Theta coins. The exchange was about to shut down because the Chinese government was putting them out of business. Apparently, the Chinese government was working to ensure they had much more control over Bitcoin and the ecosystem. If we didn’t pull our coins and tokens out of the exchange by a certain date, we’d lose it all. I guess that’s China for you.

So we had to move the coins. We asked…

“Should we keep them?”

“Sell them?”

We decided to keep them. HODL!

Jesse bought a Trezor One hardware wallet and moved the coins onto the device for safekeeping. A hardware wallet is sort of like a digital lockbox for cryptocurrency, where the private information is stored within a physical electronic device. It looks a bit like a USB stick. We managed to move our coins mere minutes before the exchange disappeared.

Life went on. 


I forgot about the coins and really the rest of my crypto holdings for that matter and just got back to work on my business. 

And then…

Prices crashed. It was a nuclear winter in crypto land. 

My $25k was now probably worth a few pennies on the dollar and at that point in my life, I just didn’t want to deal with the emotional roller coaster of big swings in the crypto markets. I had enough on my mind with work and didn’t want to be distracted and stressed with these insane markets. I wanted to sell off all of my positions and just ignore the crypto world for a bit.

So I asked Jesse to transfer me my coins so I can sell them and be done with it.

“I can’t do that.”

I asked, “What do you mean you can’t do that? Just send them or sell them.”

And then he said something that would set us off on a wild adventure:

“I forgot the password!”

You see, this is remarkable for two reasons. First, Jesse remembers everything. He remembers all of our friend’s license plate numbers from high school. After all, he plays poker for a living playing 8 tables at a time, knowing the odds, and remembers how probably dozens of different players play the game. In fact, one of the first places we heard about Theta was from another poker player!

Secondly, if you guessed the password incorrectly too many times, the device self-destructs. I mean, it doesn’t actually blow up, but the entire contents erase and our coins would be lost forever! The good news however is if you forget the password, you can always restore the device using a recovery seed which is basically a 24-word passphrase. Jesse wrote this down on a piece of paper while originally setting up the Trezor, but it got thrown away by accident along the way.


We were screwed! 

At this point, I was almost relieved. After all, the investment basically went to zero and in many ways, it made living with that shitty investment decision a little bit easier to stomach.

I forgot about the coins and went on with my life again. 


Until…

The nuclear winter in crypto land was over. Prices started to go up again. 

Our $50k was back to about half.


Prices went up again….back to $50k. 

Now we figured we should really try to get this wallet open.

“Dan, you’re an electrical engineer. You can figure it out!” I should have paid more attention in class because there was no way I would figure this out. And even if I did, I had absolutely no time to even try.


At this point, I had convinced myself I would never see the money again so I ignored it.

Prices went up again!

$75k.. $100k…$200k!

At this point, we decided to get a bit more active to figure this out.  Jesse started googling the earth to find people that could help.


We found engineers that allegedly hacked this wallet before, but they weren’t interested in helping.

$400k!

We found a few engineers who seemed like they could pull it off but they either flaked, weren’t interested or ran into obstacles quickly. Some of those engineers were even engineering professors from my school.

$800k!

Finally, we found some guys in Switzerland who claimed they had done this before. They seemed like they could actually pull it off. The problem now was that I needed to meet them in Paris at their secret lab and Europe was shut down due to COVID. For a few weeks, we went back and forth trying to figure out how we could rendezvous in Europe to pass off the wallet but the combination of the shutdown and not being able to physically go to the lab to watch them hack the wallet made the prospects of this working a bit grim. 

A new update…

We see a press release about Theta:

Institutional investors Sierra Ventures, Heuristic Capital, Venture Reality Fund, and GFR Fund stake over $100M in Theta to a collective Enterprise Validator Node

$1.5mm!

We were back at square one.

Group chats with our friends were becoming ridiculous. I told Jesse if we couldn’t find a technical way to free the coins, we’d find a chemical way to free the coins. As in, we’d go away for a weekend and I’d feed him hallucinogens until he remembered the password. 

We found another engineer in Portland. He was a part of a famous hacker group back in the day and testified on the Senate floor saying, “Yes, we can take down the internet in 30 minutes.” We had been exchanging emails to see if he could be our guy to figure this out and free the coins.

He bought some hardware and special devices, made a few calls to some friends in the hacking world, and off he went, trying to hack an exact make and model of our Trezor to prove he could do this.

This is the solution Joe came up with to hack the Trezor wallet.

Over the next few weeks, he went to work and would update us on his progress.

$2.0mm!

I said as soon as he could prove success, I’d book a ticket out the next day to come to meet him in person with the wallet. We also talked about the fact that if he could actually pull this off, he could offer these services to many more people like us that are locked out of their wallets. In addition, we agreed that we’d have to film this hack because one way or the other we would have to tell this story. 

It would either be a triumphant story or a miserable and expensive story, but either way, we were going to document the whole thing.

And sure enough, I eventually get an email with something to the effect of…


“I did it!”

The next day, I drove to Jesse’s apartment, picked up the wallet, and booked my flight to Portland to meet the hacker, Joe Grand

The rest they say is history…

After two days in Portland, spending a few hours in his lab performing the attack on the wallet, he freed the coins!

At the time the wallet was officially hacked and unlocked, the total value of the wallet was about $2.5 million dollars. 

At the lowest point, it was about $20k. At the highest, it was just over $3 million.

Joe is now making his services available to anyone that is locked out of their wallets with a new company called offspec.io

Did we sell the coins? Yes, we sold some.

The rest? We put on another Trezor and locked it away.

And that’s my story about how I had $2mm locked on a crypto wallet.

And you can see the whole thing go down in this video.

And, The Verge wrote about it here too.

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A Tornado Hit My House

On May 27, 2001 an F2 tornado hit my house while I was inside. The tornado was 200 ft wide and had winds of up to 120 miles per hour. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries.

However, the past two days have unleashed horror on some folks in Alabama where Tornado’s have claimed at least 247 lives, as of this writing, and these events keep bringing me back to that day when the tornado hit my house. That day looked like this:

It was a warm, sunny day and family and friends were at my parent’s house. Some people were outside barbecuing, some were in my brother’s room hanging out (room facing the front of the house), and I was in my room with my cousins (room facing the back of the house). We were all chatting, joking around, doing what anyone would do during a house party and then it happened..

My brother and his friends started sprinting down the stairs screaming “tornado, tornado…get in the basement.” My entire room cleared out and my cousins quickly followed suit.

For whatever reason that I still cannot describe to this day, I didn’t run down the stairs right away. Instead, I made my way to my brother’s room to see what exactly was going on.

As I took a step towards his door, the air pressure changed. My ears started to pop as if I were on a plane. A very depressurized plane. Explosion-like sounds started going off in succession all around the house. From room to room it sounded like dynamite going off. Those sounds finally knocked sense in to me and within seconds I made it down to the basement, but by the time I got downstairs it was all over.

After waiting about a minute or so, and after everything had calmed, I walked back upstairs to assess the damage starting with my bedroom. My room was virtually untouched. For whatever reason, my windows weren’t locked and the windows flew open to equalize the pressure.

My brother’s and sister’s room however didn’t have the same fortune. Their windows were locked, so in order for the pressure to equalize the windows imploded creating the explosion-like sounds. Their rooms were torn apart. I stuck my head outside my brother’s broken window and on the front lawn I could see my cousin’s van. It had been tossed upside down and thrown about 50 feet from the street onto our front lawn. I turned my head right to look at my neighbor’s house. Half of their roof was missing. Their front yard was destroyed.

I did some more assessment and walked around the house mesmerized by what had just occurred. As I made my way to the backyard I heard the sirens. At that point, I made my way to the front of the house to see the commotion and it looked like a war had just taken place on my block. An army of firetrucks and police cars all surrounded the block. By this time, the rest of our family, friends and neighbors also made it to the street and it looked like everyone was accounted for and ok. No missing people. No injuries. A lot of shock and disbelief.

In hindsight it is still very bizarre that I had this experience. Who would ever think a tornado could affect you (especially in New Jersey)?  Nonetheless, it happened and I’m fortunate to be able to tell the story.

So keep an open mind and always be on alert because you never know what can happen to you, until it does.

My thoughts and prayers are with the folks involved in these southern storms. Stay safe.

Side Note: If you or anyone you know has been involved in a tornado, please leave your story in the comments section.

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