Back in early 2012, I did some online gambling on the dark web 🥸
The currency was Bitcoins, which back then weren't worth anything, and practically couldn't be used for anything. Other than drugs, illicit activities, and whatever people were trying to scam you into buying.
There was even a website you could visit once a day, which gave you a small amount of bitcoins - two cents if I recall - for free, just 'cause.
Side note: Those two bitcoin cents would be worth almost $700 at the time of writing.
I ended up with a couple of hundred dollars in winnings. I was pretty good at poker and blackjack.
... or probably just very lucky.
I tried to get them paid out, but I couldn't figure out a way to do it. Neither Western Union nor PayPal - two of the more reasonable payout options on MtGox - worked in the Faroe Islands (which is were I lived at the time). Some people seemed to get them paid out as Amazon giftcards, but even Amazon was flaky at best in the Faroes.
So I didn't get them paid out. They were stored in a file on my machine called wallet.dat, and there they remained.
My interests in gambling and the deeeeep dark web waned, and I forgot about them. The wallet.dat file remained on my harddrive, lost to time.
Years later, in late 2017 I believe, bitcoins were exploding.
I had no clue where the old harddrive was. And if I remember correctly, it broke back in 2013, and was replaced.
To this day, whenever I find an old harddrive, or boot up an old computer, I make an exhaustive search, trying to locate this old wallet.dat file. I have repressed the traumatic memory of calculating how much I potentially had, but I faintly remember it being in the millions. 💸💸💸💸
I try to tell myself, that it is as if I got it paid out all those years ago. As if I got them paid out, and spent them all on beer. It is what I would have done anyhow.
But it still hurts a bit. 😅
... Okay not a bit, a lot.
The day before yesterday, on the 28th of January 2021, I had to do some work on our Office 365 email system. For some reason, the only way to create DKIM keys for a domain, is via PowerShell. So I had to bust out an old laptop that runs Windows.
I bought it second-hand back in 2013, so there was no way the Bitcoin wallet was to be found there. But logic be damned, we're talking about millions here. Couldn't hurt to do an exhaustive search.
First step, search for "wallet" in AppData. It finds a bunch of stuff - like some images used by Google Chrome. And then, at the very bottom:
wallet.dat
To my surprise, I had actually found a wallet.dat file. 💰💰💰
I immediately backed it up, and with my stomach bursting with butterflies, I began trying to recover it.
Only to find, that it was a password-protected Dogecoin wallet.
I don't even remember trying out Dogecoin. But apparently I did.
I searched for ways to recover Dogecoin wallets, and to my surprise, it has been skyrocketing as of late!
... But according to the results, I have no way of accessing the wallet, because I have no fucking clue what the password is. 💸💸💸💸
I tell myself it's empty. But I'll never be able to find out for certain. It's the uncertainty that's the worst.
Woe is me.
My experiences with crypto are not all bad, though. I bought some Bitcoins back in 2018, after they had thouroughly crashed, and earned a solid sum when they exploded once again a couple of weeks back.
But I'll never buy crypto again. Ever!
... I think.