Forgotten Bitcoin
Rifling through a dead man’s tech in search of riches
Finding someone else’s Bitcoins sounds significantly easier than mining your own. The current hash rate of the Bitcoin network — that is to say the number of guesses per second at a valid Bitcoin string of letters and numbers — is 170 EH (ExaHashes). ExaWhat? That looks like:
170,000,000,000,000,000,000 / guesses per second
ヽ༼⁰o⁰；༽ノ
For context, that’s like:
- More than the number of human cells in Greece.
- The number of kilometers between here and some random part of intergalactic space.
So that option was out.
Instead I focussed on a potentially far more lucrative and likely avenue:
My late Uncle
He was a technologically savvy recluse. Most who had had something to do with him chose not to after a while. As an early adopter of computers, he’d participated on many an internet forum before social media was a thing. The whole notion of no-privacy, monetizable social media was anathema to him. If anti-social media had existed, that would have been his thing. Privacy obsessed, he was convinced Uncle Sam was tracking everything and actively pursuing the liberty minded. After his death, when the family were deciding what to do with his things, the possibility of Bitcoin lying stashed away on some laptop hard drive or storage device — as a final f*@# you to centralized control — was too appealing to ignore.
Brimming with optimism, I slowly reached for the first hard drive (HDD) and purposely plugged it in, quietly confident that I was on the verge of something momentous. The moment of truth had arrived.
Bitcoin just fits. It’s decentralized, limited, divisible and secure. Back in 2009–10 the GFC was fresh in everyone’s minds, and confidence in financial institutions was at an all-time low. Nobody knew about blockchain technology. It was brand new; the wild west of tech innovation, and to an idealogue, a digital currency like this would have been irresistible. Back then you could mine thousands of Bitcoins in a week on your spare laptop!
James Howells did that, and he realised years later when the hard drive from his old laptop had gone to landfill. Those Bitcoins would now be worth close to half a billion dollars. However, the local council won’t let him mine the landfill site to search for the hard drive, despite his promise to share the spoils with them if found.
Mint Mobile’s advertisement sums up the sentiment:
Back then the young tween me was busy getting scammed on some affiliate marketing bullshit. The newly built desktop computer I was using to give my money to some internet sheister would have had ample power to mine Bitcoin. But it never would, and maybe just as well given my level of financial literacy at that time. My uncle on the other hand, might just have hashed out a few Bitcoins while locked away from the world in his tin shed.
By late October things were ready and it was time to decide what we were going to do with all my late uncle’s tech. I politely told the family that before we changed, repurposed, sold or gave away the tech, I would wipe all the data properly and…search for Bitcoin. Just not in that order.
Bitcoin price: $694
Time to get started.
The Search
I didn’t know it was going to go 100x. Remember, this was also before soccer mums were talking about it in late 2017.
The first problem was that there was lots of tech. Massive external hard drives, numerous USB drives and multiple computers all had to be collected and meticulously and thoroughly searched.
The second problem was…I had no idea how to search for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Fact (can be skipped)
You don't store Bitcoins on your computer. Bitcoins are kept in a publicly distributed ledger which contains a history of all transactions referred to as 'the blockchain'. You just store a 'Private Key' which is linked to a 'Public Key' on the ledger and lets you spend the associated Bitcoin amount, a transaction which is then verified by the other computers on the network and also added to the ledger. These private keys, together with your public key can be stored in a secure 'wallet' file on your computer.Based on what I knew about him, I felt confident he wouldn’t have used an internet service to store his Bitcoin. He was far too sceptical of external sources and their susceptibility to external influence to store anything of value with them. Can you blame him after what happened to Mt. Gox, the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange at the time? No, he would have stored it locally. It was going to be a big undertaking.
Armed with a bevy of search tools and data recovery software, my search was ready to begin for anything resembling a wallet.dat file, or a wallet whatever. Brimming with optimism, I slowly reached for the first hard drive (HDD) and purposely plugged it in, quietly confident that I was on the verge of something momentous. The moment of truth had arrived.
Text files.
Thousands of gigabytes of text files. All full of repetitive crap. Some kind of hierarchy codified in text. Data recovery showed nothing erased, suggesting that these text files were the first and only things written to the drive.
To give you an idea of the scale of all this…text, the bible is a big book that many have encountered at some point. It’s like a thick paving stone with the thinnest pages of 8-point typeface. It’s dense. That would fit in about 5MB.
A SENSE OF SCALE 5 MB reference size of a big book
3,400,000 MB used on the external HDD
____________
680,000 times more text
____________...but you weren't missing much.
Anyone who has done something similar knows just how long it takes to search for current and deleted files on massive hard drives. It’s a meticulous and painstaking process going into depth.
“Oh my god, this is like heaps boring!”
- 9 year old me
I felt like I was Bitcoin mining of sorts, and it was hard, repetitive work that made me hungry. Of course, it’s much harder today than it was back in 2010, when a mere PC could profitably mine the coins¹. So cheap was Bitcoin back then you needed thousands to buy anything, as Lazlo Hanyecz can attest, after paying 10,000 Bitcoins for two pizzas:
“I’ll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas.. like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day. I like having left over pizza to nibble on later.”
- Lazlo Hayecz, May 2010
Leftover pizza is the best! Thanks Lazlo for doing the first commercial purchase with Bitcoin. I made my own pizzas on this occasion.
ANOTHER SENSE OF SCALE (can be skipped)
Mining for new Bitcoins requires generating random strings of numbers and letters in a process called 'hashing'. It's a form of encryption, thus the 'crypto' in 'cryptocurrency'. The difficulty of finding new Bitcoins has increased a lot since it started, as has the computing power.
In 2009, when the first Bitcoins were mined, the difficulty level was 1 and the computer hardware required making 4.21 MH/s, or 4.21 million hashes (guesses) per second. Fast forward to today where the 'hash rate' on the bitcoin network has reached...wait for it:
170 quintillion per second or 170 EH/s That's:
170,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 170 billion x a billion
That's more than the number of human cells in Greece.
Or the number of kilometers between here and some random part of intergalactic space.Despite my diligence and pizzas, those massive external HDDs were a massive letdown.
Problems with My Logic
- He has kids, so why would I get the Bitcoin? Awwh, but we are all a family, and besides, when did money problems ever get between family?
- If he’s privacy obsessed, wouldn’t everything be encrypted? Well, yes. But his laptop HDDs weren’t encrypted. He would be more the kind of person to hide a wallet file in an encrypted file, but then he also had a penchant for storing details in text files.
- Why didn’t I just ask him about Bitcoin while he was alive?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I agree. That would have made things so much easier and more interesting. Put simply, I hardly ever saw him, and it simply never occurred to me. As a result, I would have to become a digital gold digger. That said, I guess all cryptocurrency miners are digital gold diggers. - How else did I screw up my logic?
Don’t Boot That Computer!
The coins were now at about $700 each, not enough in my opinion to hire professional help on a hunch, but enough to continue the diligence. I didn’t know it was going to go 100x. Remember, this was also before soccer mums were talking about it in late 2017.
The business end of the operation were the laptops. I pulled the hard drives out and put them on an external test bench. Booting a HDD causes write operations to execute, potentially obscuring recovery options for previously deleted files if that part of the drive is overwritten. I wanted to avoid this. He had Windows and Linux installed. Nibbling on some pizza, I searched for:
- Bitcoin clients and mining software.
- Any references to wallet files.
- Any reference to Bitcoin or Crytpo.
- All archive files, encrypted or not.
- Deleted files.
- Text mentions of the above or any hint of account information.
There were hits of course, but none from the first two big indicators on the list. Over a few days, the utter banality of the content had an enthusiasm-crushing effect on me.
Despite oodles of proof of profound paranoia and some ridiculous archival complexity, after three weeks of wading through all the permutations I could think of, I wound up the digital autopsy, declaring it a…learning experience.
Then the price surged to $950. I was crushed.
Was there a HDD I didn’t find? Or a memory stick I had missed? The truth is, it’s so easy to encrypt this information with a simple passphrase and I would have no hope of ever finding it. Barring asking him while he was alive, any scavenge after the fact was always going to be a longshot. Maybe this is what I deserved for rifling through the digital equivalent of a dead guy’s wallet. Was this my karmic comeuppance for being a vulture?
Maybe.
But it was worth a shot, right?
References
- The Next Web. A brief history of bitcoin mining hardware.
- BTC.com https://btc.com/stats/diff
