So Bitcoin's been doing something genuinely deranged this week and it sent me down a rabbit hole I did not expect to be in on a Thursday night.
Quick backstory for anyone who wasn't reading back in the early days of this blog (hi, both of you): sometime in late 2011, right around when I started this thing, I got curious about Bitcoin mining and let my old Compaq laptop chew on it overnight for about two weeks, mostly out of boredom and a vague sense that I should understand what all the fuss was about. I got a laughably small amount out of it, wrote maybe one post about how slow and dumb the whole process felt, and then completely forgot about it. The laptop died a while back. I assumed the wallet file died with it.
This week's news is what dragged the memory back up. There was a Senate hearing on Monday, the "Beyond Silk Road" one, where a bunch of officials basically said virtual currencies aren't inherently evil and might have legitimate uses, which sounds like a low bar to clear except that everyone expected the opposite. Ben Bernanke apparently sent a letter to the committee saying virtual currencies "may hold long-term promise," which is about as close to an endorsement as you're going to get out of a Federal Reserve chairman. The price reacted the way you'd expect: it jumped hard, blew past $600, kept climbing, and by midweek people were watching it flirt with numbers that would've sounded like a joke a year ago. I don't fully trust any single exchange's number right now because Mt. Gox has been weirdly laggy and disconnected from the other markets, but directionally it's been a straight line up since Monday afternoon.
Anyway. I spent about ninety minutes last night going through an external drive I use as a graveyard for dead laptops' contents, and I found it. A wallet.dat file, sitting in a folder literally named "misc junk," dated December 2011. I have not been able to get it to open properly yet — my Bitcoin-Qt install is ancient and it wants to resync the entire blockchain from scratch before it'll even look at the wallet, which at current blockchain size is going to eat my bandwidth for the better part of two days. So I'm sitting here not knowing if there's $40 worth of Bitcoin in that file or something meaningfully more, and the not-knowing is a genuinely uncomfortable feeling in a way that's a little embarrassing to admit.
Here's my actual opinion on all this, since I promised myself years ago I'd never write one of those wishy-washy posts that just restates the news: I think the price action this week is mostly a story about a very illiquid market reacting to a single piece of institutional validation, not some fundamental repricing of what Bitcoin is worth as a currency. Nobody's buying coffee with it. The volatility alone disqualifies it as a currency in any practical sense right now. But as a speculative asset that a small number of true believers are hoarding, sure, of course a friendly-ish Senate hearing sends it up 30% in three days. That's not an efficient market, that's a thin one.
Small tangent because I can't help myself: I also think it's very funny that the same week Bernanke is writing polite letters about virtual currency legitimacy, my actual bank's website still makes me answer three security questions and look at a picture of a sailboat to prove it's really me logging in. The "future of money" and "the thing I use to pay my electric bill" feel like they're operating on completely different technological timelines and nobody involved seems bothered by that.
The blockchain sync is at 34% as I'm typing this. I'll probably know by the weekend whether I've got beer money or something closer to a car payment sitting in a two-year-old file I nearly threw away twice. Given how bad I am at holding onto anything valuable for longer than a few months, I'd put decent odds on "beer money," but I'm going to let the download run either way, because now I have to know.
If anyone else mined a little bit of this stuff back when it was a curiosity instead of a headline, I'd genuinely love to hear whether you kept track of your wallet better than I did. I suspect the answer for most people is no.