I know this a bit like the Way Back Machine but i just read a piece on WIRED magazine
https://www.wired.com/story/i-forgot-my-pin-an-epic-tale-of-losing-dollar30000-in-bitcoin/ bit of a good read.
mine was not so glamorous, its more down to earth. i dont have children on school holiday in London or have founded a website or two whilst working for WIRED.
in 2012 i got into btc for the pure crypto curious side of my brain. between formula 1 and my IT work it was starting to be my 3rd hobby.
i bought .7 of one via local bitcoins
i was quietly mining them via cpu and a block eruptor or 2. very very slim pickings but i had no fewer than 20 wallets across several hard drives. some hard drives failed thereby losing my mined coins.war
i also dabbled with the alts, LTC DRK FTC QRK etc
i bought LTC and DRK but mined around 5 DRK.
Fast forward to 2017 and things have peaked immensely. Japan granted exchanges, China fell in and out of BTC and ASICS are ruling the crypto world not to mention the new kid on the block, ETH.
In 2016 i started to compile my coinfolio by redeeming my LTC on eexchanges, however i could never find my BTC stash. i figured i had around 16 coins in total but these were broken up over so many wallets and hard drives.
i found adresses her an dthere and many were 0.002 and 0.0003 and bits and pieces.
i then stumbled across one for 0.52 of a btc.
i pulled up the address on the block explorer and sure enough, it was unspent.
After loading many wallet.dat files into bitcoin core to find the address i discovered frustration quickly as many were password protected.
having tried bitrecover and pywallet to try and bruteforce it but a 37 character password meant a few million years even if i knew a few of the characters so it was as good as gone.
i then ventured over to blockchain and uploaded the wallets to get a better look at the transaction to find 1 transaction that turned out to be odd but jogged my memory immediately.
knowing that all my wallets appeared to be locked, i found an email i sent to myself in 2013, and stuck in draft mode on an old mining laptop (yes you could sort of mine on laptops back then)within that email was a wallet.dat file and the accompanying text had the wallet address which was .52. i had found the wallet but was it encrypted??? i feared it was as it was too good to be true.
it was friday night and there i was reindexing the 147 gig blockchain on my core with the wallet.dat i found loaded. at 11:45pm the wallet synched and there was no lock icon. 4500AUD bitcoin was mine again.
After losing my purchased btc to cex.io via buying hash power, in the era the returns were very low, i feel on top of the world, like finding 4500 in the top drawer.
apprehensive about the wallet i did i test transfer to my exchange, and what do you know, no password prompt, it was unencrypted / unlocked.
after the confirms and verified receipt i then transferred the rest.
happy days. i do have abot 6 more hard drives to sift trhough but i feel this is the largest single wallet and will quit while i am ahead.
i hope others out there have similar cool positive ending stories. i now how the smug bitcoin look again. i had the dash coin one as well a few weeks ago.
