Hello everyone, I recently did a cleanup on my external hard drive and I found a wallet.dat file.

At first I didn't have any idea of what this was, so I went ahead and deleted the file and continued my cleanup. I was still pretty intrigued by the filename, "wallet" so I looked up the exact name of the file: 'wallet.dat'. The first search result was this: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet. I read that it's basically a file containing all of the important information related to a Bitcoin wallet. I also read that this file is normally located in the Bitcoin Core wallet directory, so I went ahead and installed the latest version of Bitcoin Core and looked in my trash bin folder, and sure enough, the wallet.dat file was in there. I had to wait 2 days or so for it to sync to the blockchain. Unfortuantely, I knew did not mine any BTC back then, I could only remember visiting a faucet a few times.

Today I woke up to this: 2.49 BTC sitting in the balance field. Man, I knew Bitcoin wasn't worth 20$ anymore! Let me tell you, this made my day, probably, my week or even this entire year!

Is there anything I need to do now that I'm holding a pretty big amount of Bitcoin? I've read that hardware wallets are the safest, should I buy one? Is there anything I need to know?