Sixty-one percent. That was the charge on my battery bank at 4:40 pm on January 7, with ice on the inside of the storm door, a Coleman lantern on the kitchen counter, and the whole block dark since 6:05 am. Ice storm, day one of who knows how many. The house thermometer read 58 and falling. My portfolio had a deadline, and the deadline did not care about the weather.
Dana, a coworker of nine years, was buying $6,120 of ethereum from me at a price we hashed out in December — two units at $3,060 each, cash on delivery, her deposit already in my pocket and the remainder in an envelope with my name sharpied on it. The agreement had one condition that mattered now: on-chain transfer by January 9, before she flew to Phoenix for a week. The funds sat on my hardware wallet. The hardware wallet needed power, the phone app needed a network, and the router had been a brick since breakfast.
Here is what three days without a grid actually tested. Not my conviction, not my market views — my hardware. One battery bank at 61 percent, a laptop at 31, an OTG cable in the junk drawer, and a phone holding two bars of LTE. The signing itself took four minutes once the pieces were on the table. Assembling the pieces was the part I had never once rehearsed.
the deal, hashed out in december
Dana asked in mid-December, after one of my desk monologues about self-custody ran one sentence too long. One condition mattered. We settled it on a sticky note: two ethereum units at $3,060 each, $6,120 flat, no ACH, no wire, no app that wanted her social security number, cash on delivery. She handed me $1,000 cash as a deposit before the holidays. The sticky note said JAN 9 and sat on my monitor all month. Neither of us reckoned about electricity even once, which is the most expensive thing on that note.
the storm took the router at 6:05
January 7, and the power died mid-pour of a first coffee at 6:05 am. The router lasted forty minutes on some backup I did not know it had, then went dark with a click I heard from the next room. By noon the street trees were coated an inch thick, and the utility's outage map showed 40,000 customers dark, our block a single red pixel among thousands across three counties. By 4:40 pm the house was at 58 degrees and I was counting my electronics like a man checking his pockets after a ferry.
the inventory at 61 percent
The inventory, itemized. Battery bank: 61 percent, rated 20,000 milliamp hours, bought for camping in 2022, last charged in November, a fact I discovered with an awfully specific sinking feeling. Laptop: 31 percent, good for maybe ninety careful minutes. Phone: 78 percent, on LTE, two bars, the tower down the road running on a generator. Hardware wallet: no battery at all, USB-powered, which abruptly stopped being a design complaint. Lantern: full of kerosene, useless to every device I owned. Total charging capacity for everything that mattered: one aging battery bank, and a decision about how to spend every percentage point of it.
day two: the junk-drawer cable
January 8, 9:15 am, and the plan fit in two hands. Phone at 71 percent after a night on the battery bank. Hardware wallet connected straight to the phone with the OTG cable from the junk drawer — the cable I had bought for a road trip in 2023 and never once used for anything real. The companion app composed the transaction I had drafted the night before: 2.0 ETH, Dana's address triple-checked against the paper copy she had mailed me in December, fee set manually at $2.90 because the network was quiet at breakfast time. Sign on the wallet's two buttons, address verified on its little screen, confirm. Four minutes, eleven seconds. Broadcast over LTE at 9:19 am, first try, and the phone dropped to 69 percent doin' all of it.
the confirmation that beat the deadline
Dana's text landed at 9:31 am: received, verified on her own wallet app, envelope opened on her kitchen counter that evening with her husband as witness. She flew to Phoenix on the ninth as planned, and the sticky note came off my monitor a full day early. The whole sale — agreed in December, priced at $3,060 a unit, settled from a dark house while the furnace sat cold — never touched a bank, a wire form, or a business-hours counter. My side of it cost four minutes and $2.90 in fees. Her side cost an envelope. Both of us kept our appointments.
what the outage actually tested
The interesting part is what failed, because none of it was cryptography. The wallet worked. The signing worked. The failure points were all boring physics: a battery bank charged in November, a laptop with ninety minutes of life, one cable, two bars of signal. Self-custody discussions will argue about seed storage til everyone is hoarse, and then hand-wave the electricity entirely, which is exactly the trade I had made without noticing, in a warm house, in November. My seed was perfect and my power plan was a camp toy. The gap was never the keys. The gap was the sockets.
the power kit, itemized
As of January 11, one plastic bin in the closet holds the answer. Taped to the lid. Two battery banks, 20,000 milliamp hours each, charged on the first of every month, calendar entry repeating forever. One OTG cable, tested against the actual wallet on January 11 rather than assumed. One USB-C cable, same bin, same test. One wall flashlight with lithium cells. One printed page in a zip bag: the exact steps for a cold-house transaction — which app, which cable, which order — cuz 9 am in a 58-degree house is not the moment to reconstruct a ritual from memory.
day three, 6:12 am
Power returned January 10 at 6:12 am — the furnace clicked, the router lights came back, and the refrigerator hummed for the first time in three days. Battery banks went back on the shelf at 100 percent, the bin got taped shut, the flashlight went on its charger, and the lantern still smells like kerosene in a way no spring cleaning will fix. The lantern lives in the bin now, demoted from hero to backup. Dana is back from Phoenix. The envelope is empty. The sticky note is in the bin too. That is the whole kit.
