I left a CPU miner running on my email & webserver VPS (back when Bitcoin was fairly new and worth nothing). I managed to solo-mine 50 BTC, but forgot about it for a while.
Back in 2013, when BTC was around $13 and I was a n00b in this forum, I used most of that 50 BTC to buy a used Radeon HD 6870 (to do some GPU mining) and a couple of Butterfly Labs coffee-warmer ASIC miners. I still have these, though they're all idle as none of them are economical to mine with nowadays. (The GPU, at least, was still powering my work desktop until it got upgraded a few months ago.)
If I'd held onto those 50 BTC, they'd now be worth the better part of $2 million.
Mining proceeds mostly went into a few silver purchases at first, then into buying more ASIC miners (fastest I ever bought were a couple of Antminer S1s). None of them are economical to mine with now, so they're as much paperweights as the BFL miners.
In 2017, I decided to have another go at GPU mining and built a rig with four GeForce GTX 1070s. In about a year, it mined enough to pay for itself. In the recent runup in value, two things have happened: (1) it's once again profitable to run the rig (fired it up again last night, and it's supposed to clear $300 or so per month even with power at 12¢/kWh) and (2) the proceeds from the last round of mining have appreciated enough that they'll go a long way toward paying off my mortgage. I've also bought and held some BTC, so I'll probably only put 50-60% of current holdings toward the mortgage and let the rest of it continue to appreciate.
Our paths were similar, although I wasn't as early as you.
I did pool mine a tiny amount of BTC using my laptop, even cpu mining, but that era was long over when I first got into bitcoin. So I wanted to mine a ton of BTC. I pre-ordered a BFL Little Single. I thought I'd mine a lot of bitcoins rather than buying them. 10 months passed before I could even get my mining rig. The first halving came and went really fast, and by the time I got my mining rig it could only mine like 0.2 BTC per day.
I still mined a little bit but I also f'd around mining altcoins and even nothing at all at times. I got really discouraged by the whole BFL thing.
And it's all my fault too, I could have done some due diligence and found out that BFL was run by a long-time scammer. If I knew that I'd probably outright buy bitcoins or choose another ASIC vendor.
I did also do some silver purchases just like you. But unlike you I threw a bunch of coins into a canal one day when I was really depressed. I guess I could go diving in the muck with a waterproof metal detector.
And I've been looking at some past purchases so I can pull this from Overstock it wasn't my first or last...
If you used Bitcoin Core you can definitely find the transaction. I think it saves them in the wallet.dat so if you still have backups from that time, or are using the same wallet you can look at all the transactions and even sort them chronologically or buy amount.
