Somewhere in this, is my ~50K of BTC. Mined in the extremely early days, well before that first bitcoin pizza, back when people were still enthusiastically trying to decide if this whole “distributed ledger” thing was implemented correctly and just how good of an idea is it at all.

I used a 32 node OpenMosix cluster/lab to CPU mine just shy of 50K BTC one lazy semester break after finding out about this BitCoin thing and thinking “this will make a neat distributed stress test” much more interesting than just running the usual CPU benchmark toy programs. I fired it up, let the shell scripts fan it out till every core in the cluster was busy, and checked back about two weeks later when the next semester started. I made a note of the number and my shell scripts, deleted the wallet because its just useless data on my preciously small university school student home directory. I moved on with my life and completely forgot about it until recently when researching some cluster history I recalled the OpenMosix work I had done at University, the various ways I had used it, and to my temporary horror, the BitCoin benchmark.

I’ve come to think of it a bit like a failed lottery ticket or a bad bet at a casino. I had no way of knowing at the time 10 years ago, that the couple of megabytes of space these files took up, could one day be worth half a billion dollars. That’s not to say i’m 100% zen about it, it does still hurts a little to think about sometimes though.

Edit: Corrected my time window, a decade does wonders for compressing the experience of time passing, thinking about it again reminded me that the bitcoin block reward meant I must have run it over the semester break, not overnight.