Well, here goes a long spiel.
Probably the last that anyone had heard from me before a few days ago was dated September, 2011 according to my profile stats. So it has been a long time of me just lurking around from time to time.
I can't remember exactly when, but some story broke on the Internet about my bitcoin collection and shortly afterwards things got crazy.
The first thing that happened was my inbox here at the forum exploded with people asking for a loan of anywhere from 10k to 100k bitcoins to start the next big market place. I had a few people message me here that they had been burned by a hacker or some website that had their wallet information and asked for anywhere from 100 to 1k bitcoins as a way to help them recover their loss. I always wanted to help people, but there is no well to tell if these were sincere request or just someone out to make a quick bitcoin scam. Some of those I did help people I did help just to be nice, but word must have gotten around quick.
I had to step back from the forums for a while as it was a good place for people to chase me down. All the questions of what I would do with it or how did I get it, was I the one that hacked XYZ website and that's why I have so many, etc. Somewhere in this topic I think, is a another long explanation of how I came into possession of it all. Long story short, I was in bitcoin early when the network was small and basically used a lot of Amazon processing power to load up a ton of bitcoin miners all at once in their clusters (Amazon) using a custom compiled version of the CentOS bitcoind source files. Amazon had a big price difference between running a lot of windows sessions and running a lot of Linux sessions. Turns out, the Linux sessions were running kind of an old version of CentOS as well as I couldn't even get the compiled binaries to run.
Well, a lot of money was spent to generate that chunk of bitcoins, but not so I could posses it all, there were plans to use it as a backing for re-loadable credit cards like service that had bitcoin powering it in the background. Needless to say, that project fell out due to (at least in hindsight) very inept investors. The project floundered and then finally as a way to get out, they (investors) wanted to see what they could sell everything for. It had cost a lot of real money to produce that pile of bitcoins, so I ended up buying it for dirt cheap (at least in terms that bitcoins really had no value to them). Maybe after the 7 year NDS I signed expires, the world will know who it was, but for now I can't name anyone or business.
Once the market value was shooting up to space, the pile of bitcoins was worth a small fortune in theory at least.
A lot of bitcoins were spread around the community to help people at first, but it kind of got out of hand.
Ultimately, a large portion ended up being donated to wikileaks.org, so I'm certainly not the person sitting up top a large pile of bitcoins anymore. The rest went to paying off small debts and the very last of it was just recently donated to wikileaks.org again. I never had any intention of trying to crash the bitcoin market with a large sell-off as many theorized I would do. So sleep safe that there is one less person like me in the bitcoin kingdom.
So, no matter what legend has built up, nothing amazing or exciting has happened to the bitcoins I once had. No buying a Country or purchasing Islands of the sort. Just trying to help out where I could instead. The only thing I have left is old screenshots and empty wallet files now.
A large portion of my past time has actually been invested in the creation of an alternate digital currency for the last few years because I always thought there was a better way to do it. So that's where I spend all my time now, at
timekoin.orgI was great to catch up with everyone though, hopefully the story wasn't too boring. Maybe not as exciting as some had hoped.
This is a fun and interesting story. Bumping for all of those who haven't heard it (like me..).
Thanks for sharing knight.
Edit: I should have read to the end before posting. Geez.