Cryptohound

The Bitcoin Scavenger

I’m buying up every old laptop and pc I see. Lowballing the women at the yard sales with one crisp old hickory at a time for the newer ones, and a ten or a fiver for the oldies. They see that twenty dollar bill, and they just say yes immediately like I’m willing it. I took all the seats out of my car except the driver to fill it to the brim. I’m doing this every weekend.

The sales with some old textbooks, nintendos, and science fiction paperbacks are the best crops. That old HP desktop from high school before their son went off to college or the thinkpad of their ex-husband who was an engineer are the grails. I’ll grab the games and any cool books I see, too. Reselling those usually pays for the expenses of the weekend’s hunt with some profit.

Once I’ve secured a full load, I haul it back to my garage where I start digging. One by one, I boot up the old computers and search the file explorer for “wallet.dat” looking for satoshis, the long forgotten little spare change left over from buying a fake before heading off to school or the thousandth of a BTC that the old man mined for pure novelty’s sake back in 2012 when you could join pools on websites and mine using just your browser’s processing power.

There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin in existence. As of this frantic log in March of 2024, people estimate that 6 million are lost. Forgotten and dormant addresses hold approximately $420,000,000,000 worth of BTC at the current value of $70k per whole coin. Plenty of this is certainly gone forever, lost to the ether of the internet. But billions of it is just sitting in closets, storage units, or police stations impounds waiting to be saved, calling to me.

Almost all of the rigs I’ve scrounged up have been empty. I scrap them as quickly as possible while trying not to waste too much time looking through random digital ephemera. You’d never believe some of the digital hoarding I’ve come across—gigabytes of emails and random online recipes saved to pdf., terabytes of scanned family photos that the family probably didn’t even bother to back up, or they would’ve taken the time to wipe the hard drive of their private materials. I take care to keep all the CPUs, motherboards, and other components that I can extract literal gold from. The amount in a single computer is miniscule, but about 250lbs. of mother boards is a bit over a half ounce, that’s $1000 at today’s rate.

But Bitcoin stands to be much more lucrative, and after doing this for a few months, I’ve lucked out with a couple of PCs that had about a thousandth of a BTC each. At the current rate, a little under $200 total. But when BTC hits $2mil we’ll be talking about $2000. And by then, I plan to have gotten lucky with a few more scores anyway. Money may not grow on trees, but people throw it away every day.