What I would have spent my Bitcoins on (if I hadn't lost them in 2011)
2025-11-26
My story isn't as sad as some. I didn't spend a billion dollars on a pizza or lose millions from an accidental rm -rf of a wallet. Instead, I got involved in Bitcoin mining pretty early on using a NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT when I wasn't gaming.
Even back then with a block reward of 25 BTC, it was becoming difficult to mine a block on your own, so I mainly mined with a pool of other miners to get a percentage of each block that I helped mine.
It didn't take long for me to lose interest as I wasn't making much at the exchange rate of ~$10 per BTC. As expected, I wasn't very responsible with backing up my data and eventually lost my wallet and the seed phrase.
Needless to say, you can't exactly get a Bitcoin for $10 anymore. I don't exactly know how much I had in that wallet, but it was probably just under 1 BTC. Let's assume in the most fortunate of alternate realities that I found my seed phrase, written on some forgotten notebook in my childhood closet, last month when the peak exchange rate was $126K.
So maybe somewhere around $100K is what I could have had. That's pretty much what I spent on college.
Sidenote on "crypto investments"
I actually don't condone trading cryptocurrency as an investment. The original intent was for it to be an actual currency. Unfortunately, the extreme volatility in value has made speculation the norm (by far if I had to guess). I think it's a cool technology that has become a damn shame.
How not to lose your files
Since I learned a $100K lesson the hard way, I have greatly improved my backup strategy. The only piece of Haskell software I've ever used, git-annex, maintains a history of my files to prevent accidental deletion. And I have my entire annex stored in three places:
- Encrypted in BackBlaze B2 (thanks rclone)
- Online storage on a server in my office
- Offline storage on a portable hard drive in the safe in my closet
As you can see, I'm now following 3-2-1 closely.
If my house burns down, hopefully the copy in the fireproof safe survives. Since the data on that hard drive isn't kept completely up to date, I'd at least need the keys on there to decrypt my BackBlaze copy (which is updated weekly).
The decryption keys are also stored on my phone, so I can also get all of my data back that way. If I lose both my phone and the safe, it's game over.
Data privacy
Compared to my Bitcoin wallet from 2012, many files that I'm storing nowadays are priceless. Pictures of my daughter as a baby, software that I've poured thousands of hours into writing, etc.
It would be cheap and easy to store everything on Dropbox or Google Drive and forget about it. But you're reading fossable.org, where control matters.
Cloud storage solves the data loss problem about 99%. There would have to be a serious catastrophe for Google to accidentally lose your data. What's way more likely would be getting locked out of your account in one way or another. Or, Google can probably terminate your account any day of the week if it wants to.
The real problem with cloud storage is that it's not private.