adg

Yeah that's great! Unfortunately, your P4 laptop is unlikely ever again to generate a block, with the difficulty rises since then.

My own story goes the opposite way. I arrived at this forum when Bitcoin was featured on slashdot, and wanted to generate some coins. But then I discovered that the Linux client didn't work on Fedora Linux, so I wasn't able to start generating until later - by which time the difficulty had shot up by the maximum increase of four times.

A while after that, my family and I visited relatives for a few weeks. I left my computer generating at home on all cores, at 4500 kHash/sec, expecting to find some juicy bitcoins awaiting when I got back three weeks later. Can you guess what went wrong?

Yep, the day after I left my house, the overflow vulnerability was discovered in 0.3.9 and my computer spent three weeks and many kilowatt-hours generating a nice bundle of worthless coins.

Then, I suggested to my wife that we buy some BTC. Up till then I had just dabbled with very small quantities. She decided to think about it for a week, after which she agreed, but in the meantime the BTC price had doubled.

Despite those setbacks (and also some minor hassles with PayPal that increased the cost of one of my deals), I count myself lucky to be one of the early adopters.

It was a disappointing surprise when I got home. But I can see the funny side of it.