Bitcoin Treasure Hunt

 As I was searching old hard drives for the passport story of 1997, I happened upon a June 2015 folder titled "bitcoin".  A couple of years ago, I had embarked on a treasure hunt in my old computers searching for files titled "wallet.dat" and even found some.  But alas - didn't know what to do next and gave up on thinking I had any old bitcoins stored locally.  Here is where AI comes to the rescue.  When I found this 2015 folder with a file titled "wallet.dat", AI motivated me to try to discover what was in that file.   

Next I downloaded Bitcoincore with it's methodical (and long very long) blockchain synching process to merge my old wallet.dat into it's stored folder.  Next I had to wait for the synch to arrive at June 2015 with great anticipation that I would find a treasure of bitcoins.

Alas - no transactions.  I vaguely remember playing around with educating myself on bitcoins back then - reading about them and like everyone considering them like rewards points with trivial redemption.  So it is likely I tried to set up a wallet then - but then lost interest.

My interest revived in 2017 when I set up a coinbase account and tried my $100 experiment of getting money in and out of the account to prove that bitcoin could be an alternate currency.  But back then I was unwilling to trust that bitcoin was more than just a meme type activity.

And so there still remains skeptics about cyptocurrency and it's proper place in a diversified portfolio.  And maybe still is just buried treasure for future pirates.