I misplaced about $23,000,000 dollars and I am pissed!

[ThiefzV2]

LONG STORY. For Cliff notes version, skip to the end. Back in early 2010, I started mining bitcoins using my Intel Quad-core CPU and my Nvidia GPUs with a CUDA and OpenCL client until December because the generation difficulty increased during that month, and plus I was moving also so I was pursuing other things. During the calendar year, I mined about 19,000 BTC altogether. Remember all of this was before the ASIC takes hold, and words spread, and many people jumping into the bandwagon, and makes mining a total b!tch since the algorithm is designed to give only a certain total of bitcoin into circulation every 10 minutes.

I got into bitcoin mining because I was fascinating by the hashing and encryption process, because back then when I was playing SRO I had a buddy [Death2All] that hacked and downloaded Joymax's entire database, and gave me a small list of all the gold farmers belonging to Chinese IPs along with the MD5 hashes of their passwords. He told me to use a program called "MDCrack" and I was doing almost half a billion MD5 hashes a sec, and I made about 290 billion silkroad gold from the Chinese gold farmers. I hated goldfarmers so I thought it was a good way to get rid of them. I was fascinating that by running a hashing program, you could break the encryption and gain entry to any password protected Silkroad account. That's what got me into bitcoin in the old days when I heard about it.

I totally forgot about bitcoin for almost 3 years now. Fast forward to today, a friend asked me if I heard that something called BitCoin, and that he saw it on the news that it was worth over $1,000. My jaw dropped. Because the 19,000 bitcoins I have/had is worth about $23 million dollars today. Imagine my dismay when I tried to searching through all my burned CDs, DVDs, USBs, hard drives, and can't find my bitcoin data


Cliff Note's Version: I cannot find my USB or backup CD with about 19,000 BTC. Each bitcoin is worth about $1,200 today, according to the exchange Mt Gox, which means I misplaced about 23 million USD.

P.S. I know many of you will probably have no idea WTF I am talking about. And that's okay. I am still deciding on what to do if I come across my BTC one day.

[Gaigemasta]

If you find them you should spare your best pal here 1 measly BTC

[ltsune]

I know about Bitcoins, and that story of yours is simply horrifying.

You have to keep looking over and over again! We're talking $23 million here!
Isn't it possible that you forgot to back it up, though?

[Gaigemasta]

You should seriously call off work/school and just look everywhere. If you have them on your HDD at all ever you can usually retrieve old info with basic recovery methods

[DarkJackal]

Just looked into bitcoins a few days, but I didn't have a pc worth mining on so I didn't bother looking into it anymore. >.>

[ltsune]

Just looked into bitcoins a few days, but I didn't have a pc worth mining on so I didn't bother looking into it anymore. >.>

When I first heard about it back in late 2009 I believe, I didn't see it as anything but yet another sort of scam / pyramid-scheme. I tried to use a miner, but quickly figured that it wasn't worth my time.
Oh, how much I regret that decision now!...

[Tasdik]

That moment when you wish you had bought bit coins back in the day...

[*BlackFox]

ROFL
Well, If you exchange Bitcoins for cash... would you get $23 million?

[omier]

Didn't know you could create so much value from nothing.

[Bartic]

Yeah, but now it would take you forever to get 19k of bitcoins.

[Vaya]

always hearing about bitcoim suppliers (miners), but where the hell is the demand coming from to raise its price that high? e-drug dealers??

[ltsune]

always hearing about bitcoim suppliers (miners), but where the hell is the demand coming from to raise its price that high? e-drug dealers??

First of all, some online businesses are starting to accept Bitcoins as a payment method. Especially hosting and domain companies use this (as it's all digital goods that you just rent anyway).

Apart from that, a lot of investors have really gotten into Bitcoins, which means it now works basically like any other stock. There's a demand because investors hope that the price will increase in the future.

[ThiefzV2]

I know about Bitcoins, and that story of yours is simply horrifying.

You have to keep looking over and over again! We're talking $23 million here!
Isn't it possible that you forgot to back it up, though?

Yes, that is totally possible, but Im just trying to be optimistic here ya know? I am hoping that isnt the case. But it's been like 3 years. I usually back up my data, but I am not exactly the most organized person. I have about 8TB worth of data on all my hard drives now [most unorganized pirated software], and I have a bunch of CDs and USBs scattering around every. Maybe I encrypted the file, used a imaging software, or something, or uploaded online to a skydrive, gmail drive, dropbox, or god knows where, because I just cannot find the freaking file with a simple windows search.

[ThiefzV2]

Yeah, but now it would take you forever to get 19k of bitcoins.

True. Back then in early 2010, it was ridiculously easy to mine bitcoins. Even a person with a relativelyweak computer could make a decent amount by mining. Nowadays, even if you have a very powerful computer, you would be considered extremely lucky to get mine just 1 bitcoin because of all the ASIC and sheer number of people in the computing pool competing against each other.

When I started mining back then in early 2010, each bitcoin was worth less than $0.01. Yes, less than 1 penny. I should have invested all my money back then

[ltsune]

I know about Bitcoins, and that story of yours is simply horrifying.

You have to keep looking over and over again! We're talking $23 million here!
Isn't it possible that you forgot to back it up, though?

Yes, that is totally possible, but Im just trying to be optimistic here ya know? I am hoping that isnt the case. But it's been like 3 years. I usually back up my data, but I am not exactly the most organized person. I have about 8TB worth of data on all my hard drives now [most unorganized pirated software], and I have a bunch of CDs and USBs scattering around every. Maybe I encrypted the file, used a imaging software, or something, or uploaded online to a skydrive, gmail drive, dropbox, or god knows where, because I just cannot find the freaking file with a simple windows search.

I guess all you can do is look through everything you've got. Maybe you could search by file type - or at least filter files by filetype. That'll probably make everything go a bit faster
Please make sure to keep us posted!

[BuDo]

I'm finding this story hard to believe...seems exaggerated too....

[poehalcho]

I'm finding this story hard to believe...seems exaggerated too....

There's not really any point in doubting this. The story doesn't try to impress you or anything.
True or not, it's still just the story of a dude that misplaced his potential 23 million.

btw, where can you even spend that stuff? There's not that many stores that support it yet...
afaik you can't actually convert bitcoin to real money, it's used as an online currency strictly... Am I right?
So how would you even spend that?

[ThiefzV2]

ROFL
Well, If you exchange Bitcoins for cash... would you get $23 million?

Yes, that's the current market value that it's currently trading for. There's a Bitcoin Exchange market. It works like a FOREX market where you can change one currency for another [EX: USD to Euro and vice versa]. The famous one for BitCoin is Mt Gox at https://www.mtgox.com/. For a list of all the known market exchanges that deals with BitCoin, you can go to https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Selling_bitcoins. So yes, you can exchange BitCoins for USD, the same way you can exchange the Pesos or stocks for USD. Would I get $23 million inside my bank account? It depends if by the time I sell the BTC if the market value of it went up or down.

I'm finding this story hard to believe...seems exaggerated too....

There's not really any point in doubting this. The story doesn't try to impress you or anything.
True or not, it's still just the story of a dude that misplaced his potential 23 million.

btw, where can you even spend that stuff? There's not that many stores that support it yet...
afaik you can't actually convert bitcoin to real money, it's used as an online currency strictly... Am I right?
So how would you even spend that?

Think of a Bitcoin like a currency where the market rate is currently about 1BTC/$1,200USD, whereas for the Euro, it's 1Euro/1.36USD. Bitcoin can be spent online, or it can be converted to other currency aka "real money" to borrow your words.


I've been very stressful lately asking myself many questions. What would I do if I find my file? Do I tell my friends and family, or should I try to hide it from them? If I hide it and I buy many things I've always wanted, what would my family and friends think? The thought of being able to pay all student loan debt that is drowning me and not ever working a shitty job again for crap pay is something that I look forward to. And helping out people who's been there for me. There's so many questions. But what if I lost my bitcoins for good? No words can describe what it really feels to describe all of this.

EDIT: I remember I have a Hitachi hard drive that died about a year ago, but I don't remember what's exactly was on it. I still have the drive. Should I try to get it professionally recovered even though I don't know if it's on there? And how much does it cost to recover a dead drive?

[DarkJackal]

For someone who might have, even a possible 1 million waiting to be found, you don't seem to all that concerned lol.

[BuDo]

For someone who might have, even a possible 1 million waiting to be found, you don't seem to all that concerned lol.

My point exactly....There is something non-urgent about his post...as if its important but not really all that important... Which makes me question his story... If it were me I wouldn't have time to be posting about it as I'd be searching for days....

I'd only come here to mention it after I realized its lost for good... I might not even mention it at all so I can better get pass the stressful and disappointing experience...

[poehalcho]

For someone who might have, even a possible 1 million waiting to be found, you don't seem to all that concerned lol.

My point exactly....There is something non-urgent about his post...as if its important but not really all that important... Which makes me question his story... If it were me I wouldn't have time to be posting about it as I'd be searching for days....

I'd only come here to mention it after I realized its lost for good... I might not even mention it at all so I can better get pass the stressful and disappointing experience...

Post does not specify when he found out.
Maybe he already spent a few days searching?

[*BlackFox]

What would I do if I find my file? Do I tell my friends and family, or should I try to hide it from them?

If I get... real cash in my bank account. I'm pretty sure I would tell.
Otherwise Meh!

[ltsune]

What would I do if I find my file? Do I tell my friends and family, or should I try to hide it from them?

If I get... real cash in my bank account. I'm pretty sure I would tell.
Otherwise Meh!

Same here. I would tell them.

He can extract $50.000 per month by the way

[Tasdik]

Dat interest though...

[Toshiharu]

For someone who might have, even a possible 1 million waiting to be found, you don't seem to all that concerned lol.

If I were stressed out about it that I can't find it, oh boy that'd be a terrible feeling.

I'm finding this story hard to believe...seems exaggerated too....

Completely reasonable if he hopped on the train first when a coin were dollars. I was going to hop on it, but I thought "digital currency? Hahahaha" I still think it's silly, but hey if people have trust in it then so be it.

[Love]

Lol owned, I did the same with a 500+ usd account of some f2p a while back but yeah. Moved on.

[w00t]

I would also get drunk when I misplaced about 23 million dollars.

[Love]

I like how I compared my 500 lost to his 23 mill lol.

[Tasdik]

I like how I compared my 500 lost to his 23 mill lol.

Made me lol.

[The Invisible]

I remember I have a Hitachi hard drive that died about a year ago, but I don't remember what's exactly was on it. I still have the drive. Should I try to get it professionally recovered even though I don't know if it's on there? And how much does it cost to recover a dead drive?

If the components in your drive are still functioning, you can recover the data yourself. If there's mechanical damage, send it to the pros.

But seriously though even if it increases your chance by 5%, it is worth a try.
That is better than wondering -sometime from now- if you could have found it there.

I would rather regret doing something than regret not even giving it a try (in this case searching the contents of the hard drive).

Worst case scenario you will be a couple of bux short from fixing it.