Tanner and I do a treasure hunt ($750,000.00 CAD todays value tracked down!) drilling down into an old bitcoin mining computer with a trip to Vancouver:

greenman (65)in #bitcoin • 7 years ago (edited)

My good friend mentioned over supper that his brother used to mine bitcoin and could not remember if he ever dealt with the bitcoin that may be on the old miner:

This is the box with it's owner who we will call Ernie.

As you can see the computer still has a 3.5" floppy drive and is called Tranquility.

Ernie said he decided to mine bitcoin because one of his clients asked him to and that client would take payment in bitcoin. Ernie could not remember if he ever dealt with the bitcoins that may have been mined. Ernie's brother suggested he talk to me as he knew I was into the new audit technology of blockchain.

Tanner and I were laughing last night as we took the machine apart as Tanner said we would have never thought a few years back that we would be hanging out and discussing and dealing with four different crypto-currencies: Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash, Dash and Steem.

As you can see in one of the pics above the machine hard drive was dated 2010. We got pretty excited when we researched that the bitcoins at that time were only worth .08 each. Tanner's heart started to beat pretty fast as anxiety set in thinking that the block rewards at the time were 50 bitcoins per machine a value today at near $250,000.00 CAD.

Tanner took precautions with the computer hardware and software. He made sure to remove and static from his body as he took the hard drive out. He then plugged in an IDE to USB cable adapter to the hard drive and then plugged it into a Tripp-Lite surge protector and his computer server. He named a new file called treasurehunt1.img to be used to copy the hard drive and use that copy for investigation. We discovered two hard drives at 500 gigabyte each and were set up a RAID-1 configuration. The one drive main partition proved to be corrupt but after mounting the second drive we found files and one specifically called "bitcoin". Tanner found a file called wallet.dat and copied that for future activation. He then discovered the executable mining program and transferred that to a USB stick and ran it off line air-gapped old laptop. Again, anxiety ran pretty high when the software was dated Dec 2009 and bitcoin genesis block occurred near Jan 2009. The wallet file was dated for May 2010.

The computer was in Vancouver BC and Tanner and I were in Calgary Alberta. I am in Calgary waiting for the refurbishing of a 1985 VW Camper Van and you can read about my moving into my 50 square foot van and traveling the Americas here.

So since I was sitting in Calgary just playing the wait game and had rented a car with unlimited mileage I thought a trip to see a friend in Vancouver would be cool. I hoped to be able to connect with Ernie and see if he was ready to do a forensic analysis on his old bitcoin miner.

Here are a few pictures of the trip and if you zoom up you will see some of the current British Columbia fires:

I was even turned around because of road closures.

I was able to connect with Ernie and had a good two hour discussion with him on Global Monetary Policy. You can read more on my writings on that topic here.

Here was a stop near Revelstoke BC on my way back I jumped into the lake which was I think the warmest lake I have ever swam in:

I was able to catch up with an old friend in Vancouver and thought I would stay a few days but when I could not find a hotel room as it was the long weekend I headed back home. I stopped and slept in the rental car at a rest stop on the way back.

When Tanner finally launched the bitcoin mining software we discovered these transactions:

This was extremely exciting because the mining software and hardware had mined 150 bitcoin (BTC). The only concern we saw was that the 150 BTC were transferred out a week after. Today's value of those 150 BTC is $750,000.00 and at the time was probably closer to $12.00 CAD

We have sent Ernie a preliminary report and asked him to investigate his email chains around May 2010 to see if he can confirm his transfer of those 150 BTC. Here is the address: https://blockchain.info/address/1J59DetjnoyMuMwTrQFVtdKxWnA8xgrbfM

For further reading of my writings and thoughts on global monetary policy follow this link.