Don't feel bad newbies - Early adopter without many Bitcoins

[aLongWinter]

If mining strictly for profit, yeah, there might be better ways to spend your $$$ - but if considered a hobby, mining could be considered a much better addiction than most. I have lots of fun tweaking card settings and figuring out how to best use my hash.

[bitpop]

My Ghost backup sadly turned out to have backed up corrupted data due to Bitlocker. New Bitlocker technology and old Ghost did not work well together I learned.

Best of luck with Windows. You deserved it. It had to happen.

You haven't still learn't have you?

Windows? No :/ backups yes

I mean it just wasn't that important back then. Or I would have made more backups. But what? We had no paper wallets. Should I have just aes zipped the wallet file? Probably. But then again I probably would have gotten bit by the 100 keypool. Even Linux wouldn't protect that.

Linux dd, encfs? Same thing. It still isn't common knowledge to refresh your wallet.dat.

[bitpop]

Thanks for sharing.  Being new, there are lot's of people who seem to look down on us.  They say buy, don't waste money or time with mining.

I'm probably one of the people that told you to just buy.

[Anjack]

thanks for sharing Bitpop, it was a good read! 

[btc2016]

I guess there are many thousands of people that have lived this.

I have not mined, but owned a couple more bitcoins than I have now. Overall I also believed in bitcoins, but it must have been the fear that it would be banned by all central banks (even if it would not completely stop bitcoin, it would hinder its possible bigger success).

Now I have still have a very little bit, and believing even more in it, seeing that the USA, Germany, ... are quite open to the idea of such an invention, so NOT GOING to sell them for USD or EURO, I am going to keep for sure now.

But I still want the Eco-System around bitcoin to florish, so I will spend bitcoins, but buy as many bitcoin BEFORE I want to spend them, for example:

Let's say I know I want to spend about 50 USD worth of bitcoin in the next 10 days  (3 beers, 1 dinner), so I buy 50 USD worth of bitcoin NOW. Like that I will never (for the next few years) go below treshold I have fixed, and everything will end fine.

Good that you understood, that you and we all are still early adopters!

[bitpop]

Yeah it was frightening when mt gox had their usa bank seized.

But now we have o.co accepting btc. Insane.

[artibaton]

Brohug, I know this feels. In early 2009, I solo mined for a while. Got about 300 coins before I realzied I was spending more on electricity... I forgot about BTC until mid 2012 and it was too late by then thankfully, I still had my wallet info!

[cayem]

I'm also sorry for your loss. One thing that is still a bit unclear is the "Ghost backup", you said it backed up corrupted data.
What is this corrupted data exactly? If it's raw encrypted data of the files, I guess you should be able to decrypt it by studying the
data format of bitlocker. If you don't have the encryption keys it might be hard, but maybe in the future by bruteforce key search?

[bitpop]

I'm also sorry for your loss. One thing that is still a bit unclear is the "Ghost backup", you said it backed up corrupted data.
What is this corrupted data exactly? If it's raw encrypted data of the files, I guess you should be able to decrypt it by studying the
data format of bitlocker. If you don't have the encryption keys it might be hard, but maybe in the future by bruteforce key search?

It wouldn't decrypt or mount. I did have the key. Not anymore though.

What I think happened was it it tried to store only used blocks when it needed all them. Size was smaller. Bitlocker isn't compressible.

[anarchyx914]

I am a new miner to BTC. I am trying to take advantage of the alt coins to slowly build up my BTC collection.. I didnt want to invest in a ASIC miner largely due to paranoia. I dont like paying for stuff without using a card incase I could get screwed over.

So I am mining away on DOGE, Holding ,and hoping it hits the moon and can convert to doge!

[car_dude]

That's too bad.  But I also believe tha there is huge oopportunity ahead of us with the alt coins and btc too!   Good on Ya for holding out

[awazus]

A 1000 btc lost, must have been hard, i hope to buy my first BTC today.

[dE_logics]

My Ghost backup sadly turned out to have backed up corrupted data due to Bitlocker. New Bitlocker technology and old Ghost did not work well together I learned.

Best of luck with Windows. You deserved it. It had to happen.

You haven't still learn't have you?

Windows? No :/ backups yes

I mean it just wasn't that important back then. Or I would have made more backups. But what? We had no paper wallets. Should I have just aes zipped the wallet file? Probably. But then again I probably would have gotten bit by the 100 keypool. Even Linux wouldn't protect that.

Linux dd, encfs? Same thing. It still isn't common knowledge to refresh your wallet.dat.

You don't need encfs. We use dm-crypt; it makes a virtual block device which you can use as a normal 'drive' on an underlying real partition. So even the FS (which may not support encryption) is encrypted. All backup utilities and normal FS tools will work on it.

Also there's smartd for automatic HDD monitoring. So as to warn you before it crashes.

[Ursium]

Great post bitpop.

I think it's all too easy for people to say 'I missed out'.
What they forget is that just like a lot of other people, they would have either:

a) lost interest at some point during Jan 09 - Jun 10 (it wasn't exactly super fascinating times)
b) sold a good chunk early on after gox reached $0.50
c) if not sold early, then panic sold during the many swings that followed
d) .. or lost access to their wallet due to whatever (count me in that category).

There's no shame in any of this - no one can predict the future

I'm not sure if there are any 'hard numbers' out there, but I'd be curious to find out how many early adopters did indeed keep significant balances to this date. Not many IMHO.

[The Fat Miner]

This is my first post, And I'd like to say , Sorry you lost so much and good luck in the future, One thing that niggles me is, Why on earth would you get rid of a hard drive with a thousand coins on it ? Even if it was broken it could be recovered by the right team for that amount of money believe me.

[Flashman]

Yes I could easily have mined 1000, then got overexcited and sold them at $5, even $2 a piece.... (I seem to recall they were something like 41 cents a piece when I first heard of bitcoin and the CPU I calculated hashrate for was gonna take 180 days to solo a block... somehow didn't come across pools or realise GPU mining possible, could have just been prior to general introduction.)

[dizzytt]

When Bitcoin first came out, I tried to figure out how to mine, got a wallet, could never get the client to work for mining, got sucked into playing WOW instead...ouch, time sink, made no bitcoins, still poor   Now I'm mining litecoins to trade for BTC, why not.  Sorry for the original poster not being able to save, but mad props (dating myself) to him for doing it!

[bitpop]

Thanks guys. The moral of the story is that most early people don't have a lot and that's a good thing. If we all had tons, Bitcoin just can't grow. I'm glad a lot were lost and it's more of a level playing field.

To me, the only thing that could destroy Bitcoin is if satoshi came back and still had all his, the media would destroy us. I believe satoshi is here but made the right decision.

I didn't try very hard to get mine back. 1 because it wasn't too worth it back then and 2 if every early adopter had 10,000 there's no way newbies would gain the confidence. Subconsciously I wanted to start over. Financially, well you know

[Flashman]

It is believed that Satoshi mined to a new wallet every time he got a block, there are dozens, if not 100s of early wallets containing 50 coins. Thus hard to say how much in total of those actually belong to Satoshi. It is believed that he has substantial holdings in total.

[ultrastructure]

I mined a little bit back in 2011 with my 5970 and then i gave up because i thought it was useless. No idea how much I had, but in 2012 i cleaned the harddrive and sold off the computer :/