I started mining in late 2009, when Bitcoin was still new. Mining was just a hobby and wasn’t done by any professionals. I got into mining for fun, not really thinking it would ever amount to much of anything. I was testing my normal PC hardware and GPU on mining. At that time, even a single card could mine quite a few coins per day with such a small size blockchain. I mined for a pretty good length of time, but as the Bitcoin program grew in size to several gigabytes, my GPU couldn’t handle the mining anymore. I wasn’t interested in upgrading my system, so I deleted the software and backed up my encrypted wallet files on a USB stick. I figured keeping my keys offline was the smart move because that way they couldn’t be hacked or anything. They were hardly worth anything at the time, but I still wanted to keep them since I’ve already done so much work.
Around the end of 2013, the Bitcoin price peaked to under $1000 USD and caught my attention, reminding me that I still had a USB-stick full of it. I thought it would be an excellent time to cash out some, or even all of it. I eagerly plugged in my USB stick to load the encrypted files, but to horrendously find out that the stick had died. There was no water damage or heat damage. It died cause it was too old! It was one of those cheap Chinese USB sticks where it felt so flimsy that it would snap in half if you pressed too hard. All my Bitcoins are now forever lost… Now I cringe every time I hear the word Bitcoin, thinking I could have been set for life! Worst mistake of my life.