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> I minted nearly 1 BTC rather a lot of years ago and it vanished with a Pentium II to III upgrade (or similar).

How did you do that?

I idly played with BTC one evening and I let it mine for about a week or so on a fairly poky PC and got bored of it eventually. I was more interested in Folding@Home.

As it turns out I was both right and wrong. That BTC was going to be worth up to $64,000 at one point in time. However, protein folding might save lives.

I ditched that PC and didn't copy over the wallet because I'd forgotten about it - it wasn't that important. I am very aware now that it would probably be a good idea to back up things like that 8)

I'd love to believe you but this sounds somewhat farfetched given quoted specs. It was very early on that CPU mining was almost useless and even when it was useful it would not have been on a Pentium II

In addition the early reward for mining a block was 50 bitcoins, there was no way to "mint" a smaller number.

I always console people by telling them there's no way you'd have held on to that BTC all the way to $64k. You'd probably sell it for a few hundred

And if not — definitely when it hit a thousand.

You did not even have to mine them, you could just enter an address and get 5 BTC [1].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100703032414/http://freebitcoi...

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