Photo: Spare change ©Darren Fisher Dreamstime.com
JISHOU, HUNAN — You know that nice feeling you get when you reach into a pocket and find a $20 bill you’d forgotten all about? Imagine it happening while you’re rooting around a computer backup file.
I’ve been dabbling in cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, since 2013. At the beginning, I was pretty much at sea, and in any event it was hard to see which of the several cryptocoins back then would really catch on.
Then, as now, I had small caches of Bitcoin and Litecoin on my computer. But I also had even smaller amounts of two other lesser known tokens, Namecoin and Peercoin. Neither of these seemed to be catching on, so over time I just forgot about them.
Last month, a friend asked me if I could send her some photos I took in 2015. This required me to hunt through my backup drive for the pics. After I found the photos and emailed them, I decided to poke around my backups a little more.
Scrolling through the list of program files, I came across Namecoin and Peercoin wallets. Hey, I asked myself, I wonder if there’s any money still in those wallets? Really, I had no idea.
To make a long story short (since the technical details are kinda boring), I still had a scotch over 3 NMC (Namecoin) worth about $2.50 and a bit more than 10 PPC (Peercoin) worth about $8. Not quite the same as finding President Jackson in my hip pocket but still a pleasant surprise.
Except for one tiny problem.
The Peercoin wallet was locked and encrypted with a passphrase that naturally I had completely forgotten after three years. Whoops!
I spent a couple days searching my drives and old notebooks, to see if I could find the passphrase, but had no luck.
I was able to close out the Namecoin wallet, but that $8 was smirking at me. Having exhausted all the likely places that passphrase could have been, I let the matter rest, figuring that was $8 gone forever.
Then Peercoin prices spiked a couple of weeks later. My 10 Peercoin was now worth about $20, so I renewed my search for the mystery phrase, starting with my messy desk.
As I approached the desk, ready to take the thing apart if necessary, I noticed that one of the sticky notes on the wall behind the computer display had curled up, probably from the humidity here. So, I pulled it off the wall, unfurled it, and ....
... found the missing passphrase.
Now I know what you're thinking: what kind of idiot leaves a passphrase on a sticky note next to his computer? I'm a former IT guy. I'd say the same thing. But I figured since I live alone and no one I know here is really into cryptocurrencies, I figured the sticky note was a calculated risk against my dodgy memory. And this time, anyway, it was a good choice. I unlocked my PPC wallet and traded the Peercoin for another token, about $20 richer than I was when I bought it in 2014.
Moral of the story: Hard drive backups are a necessity. So are paper backups of organic memory. Write that one down for later reference. Maybe on a sticky note.