If I did this back then, I would've sold in 2012/2013 for like $10 and made a couple hundred/thousand in college and thought I was rich.
Then now I'd prob be neurotically depressed thinking about how I could've had hundreds of mil lol.
It's a blessing dude.
I had my fun and learned some cool stuff. It’s been the anchor I hold whenever I notice the price of Bitcoin and do the trivial multiplication between the current cost of Bitcoin and what I remember roughly mining all those years ago. But like I said, regular exposure to the ideal does help. It’s much easier to come to terms with “loosing”/not acquiring a thousand dollars or ten thousand or a hundred thousand before it turns into millions of dollars than it is to come to terms with suddenly discovering that something you discarded and never thought about is worth a hundred million.
If I had that, I would dig my old hardware and tried all the tools I could find to scan drives for remnants of the wallet file(s). Maybe even wrote my own.
I basically used it as a benchmark and never even saved a single wallet file, it was worthless junk data at the time since no one was even sure it was going to be worth something.
It’s taken years since the first booms past $10k but I’m pretty zen now about the fact I threw away what was basically a hybrid between Schrödinger’s cat and a lottery ticket that one day turned into stuff worth a couple hundred of million dollars.
Edit: hope no one thinks I mean this in a “at least you only lost $20k” or “you think that’s bad” sort of way. I definitely have a sympathy for that feeling of loss, and share this story to highlight just how impossible it can be to predicted future value. There are lots of similar stories about startups like Dropbox trying to sell to Apple, or Blockbuster passing on Netflix and the list goes on. The lesson is to be accept the outcome of your past choices as the right one at the time (as long as there’s no real direct negative repercussions, but there’s not normally when it comes to investments) and be happy you got what you did from your choice at the time… be it a lawn ornament, paperweight, some deeper knowledge of Linux clusters, or a few thousand dollars.