Something like that happened to me, a friend was talking to me about it back in 2009-2010 because I had my computers churning Folding At Home protein folding stuff. It went over my head, I was skeptical, and I continued using my graphics cards for the non-Bitcoin thing.

Flash forward to January 2014, recovering from my first ear surgery, isolated and miserable. Dogecoin was really small and becoming a meme on Reddit, and out of boredom I started mining that and got a bunch of Microsoft Azure trial subscriptions and CPU mined it with those, made a couple hundred thousand Dogecoin.

Flash forward to 2021, Doge went from nothing to like 50 cents, and I was thoroughly convinced I had long since lost my wallet data, but pulled out all my old USBs and drives and ran recovery, and that wallet and a text file containing what was presumed to be the password were all over the place.

Text file was a couple pages of characters, like something out of a conspiracy theorist’s fever dream. Was I supposed to omit every other character? Am I supposed to remove the 0s and As? Beat the hell out of me, I forgot. Pointed 2 1080 Ti at that and spent a month trying to crack the password off that document. No dice.

The night I was gonna call off the search I wanted to try one last thing: try cracking each individual line as opposed to using the entire document. Less than 10 seconds later, password found. Turns out it was just the 2nd line in that document. Fucking A man, hidden in plain sight, past me thought anyone would presume it’s hashed or something, and future me fell for it hard