So yesterday the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held a hearing on virtual currencies, and I only found out because my brother texted me "isn't this the thing you were messing with in 2011?" Yes. Yes it is the thing.
I want to be clear that I did not expect this. Back in college-adjacent 2011, when this blog was maybe three weeks old, I threw something like twenty bucks at Bitcoin because a guy on a forum I frequented wouldn't shut up about it. Mined a tiny bit on my desktop for an evening, got bored when my GPU fan started sounding like a leaf blower, and forgot about the whole thing. The wallet file sat in a folder called "misc_backup_do_not_delete" on an external drive that has moved apartments with me twice.
Yesterday's hearing was, from what I can tell reading the coverage this morning, weirdly not hostile. I went in assuming it'd be a bunch of senators asking "is this for buying drugs" over and over (fair, given the Silk Road takedown was like six weeks ago), and there was some of that. But Ben Bernanke sent the committee a letter that got read out loud, saying basically that virtual currencies might hold real long-term promise if they lead to faster and more secure payment systems. That is not the sentence I expected from the Fed chairman. Officials from FinCEN and the Justice Department also showed up and, instead of torching the whole concept, mostly talked about wanting sensible regulation rather than a ban. Coming from a body that spent most of October associated with black markets, that's a genuinely different tone.
And the price noticed. Bitcoin had already been climbing since the Silk Road bust, which is its own weird bit of logic (shut down the shady exchange point and the "legitimate" price goes up, sure, fine), but this week it's been on a tear. It blew past $600 a few days ago and by this morning some exchanges were flashing numbers uncomfortably close to $900, though the price is different depending which exchange you look at, which should probably worry people more than it does. Mt. Gox, Bitstamp, CampBX, all showing slightly different realities. That fragmentation is the part nobody's Senate testimony addressed and it's the part that actually seems important to me.
Anyway. I dug up the external drive last night. Took forever to find because my cable management system is "put it in a drawer." The wallet file is there. It has a password I do not remember, tied to an email password scheme I stopped using in 2012 when I got paranoid and switched everything after that whole LinkedIn breach mess. I've got three guesses written down and I'm saving them for when I'm not tired, because Bitcoin wallets don't do the friendly "forgot password" flow, you get it right or you don't.
I have no idea how much is actually in there. Could be nothing, could be embarrassing. I'm trying not to think about it in dollar terms because that way lies madness, and also because whatever's in there, if anything, was worth about thirty cents a coin when I put it away and I am fully aware that laughing about hypothetical bitcoin riches is the most 2013 tech blogger thing I could possibly be doing right now.
Small tangent since I can't help myself: everyone I know spent Friday standing in line for a PS4 instead of paying attention to any of this. My friend Dave camped outside a Best Buy from like 9pm Thursday and got his Thursday night ruined but got his console, launched Knack immediately, told me it was "fine." Meanwhile a Senate hearing that might actually matter to how money works happened on a Monday afternoon and got a fraction of the coverage. I'm not saying the console launch wasn't a bigger deal to more people, obviously it was, a million units in a day is a real number. I just think it's funny what gets the cameras.
If the wallet turns out to have anything real in it I'll write about it. If it's fifty cents worth of an already-defunct experiment, I'll probably write about that too, because that's funnier honestly.