What the hell is (a) bitcoin?

[G. Keenan]

My brother who worked 60 hours a week the last 20 years pulled $20k of home equity out to buy an alt-coin last week. It’s now worth $4k and seems dead. Middle class guy with 3 young kids.

Crypto is driving people to bad places.

For his sake I hope it rebounds and he cashes out and cuts his losses. That is brutal.

[thrill]

NFTs make no sense to me.

Mike Shannon could explain it to you.

I think I mentioned it on here before, but I once had 40 bitcoins. Yep. Of course, they were only worth $5 apiece at the time, and were purchased for the specific purpose of procuring goods from a, shall we say, less than above-ground marketplace named after a famous ancient trade route to China.

The thing is, after those forays, I had somewhere between 1 and 3 BTC left in my wallet that I had absolutely no memory of how to access. I had to go back 2 computers and I spent the better part of a day digging around trying to figure out how to get back to it, but to no avail.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you purchased recreational drugs.

Also, you have close to $150k of bitcoin hosted somewhere and you only have it a day of looking?!

[Leroy]

My understanding of crypto = 0
My total investment in crypto = 0
My total losses on above investment = 0
My interest in ever investing in crypto =0
My hours of sleep lost fretting over investing in crypto =0

The wonderful bliss of ignorance.

[Superorganism]

I saw an article recently. Some guy threw away an old computer that he later realized had $150 million worth of bitcoin in it. He tried to lobby the city to go through the local landfill to find it. City gets half the loot.

They declined.

[Leroy]

Probably would turn up Hoffa if they started digging.

[Smith Corks One]

NFTs make no sense to me.

Mike Shannon could explain it to you.

I think I mentioned it on here before, but I once had 40 bitcoins. Yep. Of course, they were only worth $5 apiece at the time, and were purchased for the specific purpose of procuring goods from a, shall we say, less than above-ground marketplace named after a famous ancient trade route to China.

The thing is, after those forays, I had somewhere between 1 and 3 BTC left in my wallet that I had absolutely no memory of how to access. I had to go back 2 computers and I spent the better part of a day digging around trying to figure out how to get back to it, but to no avail.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you purchased recreational drugs.

Also, you have close to $150k of bitcoin hosted somewhere and you only have it a day of looking?!

Yeah, but at the end of the day (literally and figuratively), I just had no idea what else to do or try. I still have that computer, so I can always try again if a moment of sativa-induced clarity hits me.

[Superorganism]

There are professionals who collect a bounty to crack inaccessible wallets. But you’ll need to have at least a few words of the passphrase memorized for it to work. Sounds like you don’t.

[Smith Corks One]

There are professionals who collect a bounty to crack inaccessible wallets. But you’ll need to have at least a few words of the passphrase memorized for it to work. Sounds like you don’t.

The plot thickens - maybe. When I was searching those old computers a few years ago, I wasn’t even able to find a wallet file, which confused me. I didn’t know if I had deleted the whole file, or renamed or hidden it or what. But now, actually putting some thought into it for the first time in a while, something hit me - I think I had the wallet on a flash drive, not the pc. At least that’s where I remember running tor from. And here’s the thing - I’m pretty sure I still have that flash drive. However, I think I deleted everything and completely repurposed it. I guess there’s no way to recover long-deleted files, is there?

Of course, the password or phrase is the other issue, as thus far none of that has come back to me. Interestingly, though, my ancient-Chinese-trading-route passphrase has started to come back to me, and I think I might be able to piece that back together. Maybe the BTC password is still clanging around up in the gray matter somewhere?

[IMADreamer]

My brother who worked 60 hours a week the last 20 years pulled $20k of home equity out to buy an alt-coin last week. It’s now worth $4k and seems dead. Middle class guy with 3 young kids.

Crypto is driving people to bad places.

That's just a poor decision all around. It's not cryptos fault. It's no different then buying a "hot" stock on a loan. It's dumb.

I gather I'm one of the few people here who is on the crypto train. I'm not one of those guys that goes around trying to sell it to others but in my year of being involved in it, it's pretty fun to trade and the money has been great so far.

[ghostrunner]

There are professionals who collect a bounty to crack inaccessible wallets. But you’ll need to have at least a few words of the passphrase memorized for it to work. Sounds like you don’t.

The plot thickens - maybe. When I was searching those old computers a few years ago, I wasn’t even able to find a wallet file, which confused me. I didn’t know if I had deleted the whole file, or renamed or hidden it or what. But now, actually putting some thought into it for the first time in a while, something hit me - I think I had the wallet on a flash drive, not the pc. At least that’s where I remember running tor from. And here’s the thing - I’m pretty sure I still have that flash drive. However, I think I deleted everything and completely repurposed it. I guess there’s no way to recover long-deleted files, is there?

Unless you changed the format of the drive or intentionally zeroed out the data you might have a shot. Also depends if you've since filled the drive up.

Everything you have on a drive is still there until it's eventually overwritten even if you erase it - usually a drive erase really only bothers to delete the directory or the map to where the files are on the drive. So the files are sitting there loose and a program written to do it can uncover those files.

Anyway, if you look up some data recovery software you should be able to find something reputable.

I've used this before

https://www.prosofteng.com/

Maybe take the drive in to a shop or you can even call a place like Drive Savers. You ship the drive to them and they put it all the recovered files on another disk for you to browse through. I've had good success with them when I worked at a computer shop. It's a couple hundred I think but obviously would be worth it IF they could find it.

Doesn't help with the password unless you logged that on a file somewhere.