Our home on Christmas Eve









The old gaming rig,
- which I had meant to take to Goodwill was still on the floor.
looked pretty beat up-
but in its prime it was
a gaming rig worthy of respect.
They hooked it up, but it would not boot.
"This looks bad", J said.
"I duuno-this looks bad."
"Operating system missing", it said on the screen.

J opened it up and took both hard drives out, one of them was one of the first SSD of 30Gs, put them in an external case and plugged
the hard drives into another puter-

On Xmas eve the 2 brothers sifted through the files
of the derilect rigs.
It took time.
Looking,
just looking-like I sift the info sands.
No gold nugget on the first drive.
I came and went checking on the progress.
On the 2nd drive there was a File with the discriptor

Wallet.dat

(


The original Bitcoin client stores private key information in a file named wallet.dat following the so called "bitkeys" format.

It contains:

• keypairs for each of your addresses
• transactions done from/to your addresses
• user preferences
• default key
• reserve keys
• accounts
• a version number
• Key pool
• Since 0.3.21: information about the current best chain, to be able to rescan automatically when restoring from a backup.

The wallet.dat file is located in the Bitcoin data directory and may be encrypted with a password.

It is intended that a wallet file be used on only one installation of Bitcoin at a time. Attempting to clone a wallet file for use on multiple computers will result in "weird behavior"[1].

The format of this file is Berkeley DB. Tools that can manipulate wallet files include pywallet.

****************************************
"Thats it!," he said.
He put it on a thumb drive.
Will take it with him on the plane
back today.
Back to Silicon Valley.
I asked him what he is working on...


A passive sensor network technology......, his team boss will be off
to Shenzhen soon to talk about manufacturing the systemJ will help hold down the fort while he is gone.



He thinks he did NOT encrypt it- as it was not worth much at the time.
But saved it just in case: in the right format to dig up some day.

Said it will take several days to download the blockchain needed to
use the file.

Our other son did the same with the

wallet.dat he found on his old drive.



And just to be complete it is NOT for bitcoin but some other digital $$ called Litecoin.
It's worth ?maybe low thousands- not 10 of or millions,

but it made for some excitement on Christmas Eve .

PS I was glad I never got around to getting rid of the
out of date rig, or the box of hard drives down in the basement.

Too busy thinking about mining QUIK $$...
I am optimistic that we will find a file named

Wallet.dat

in a QUIK drive file in early '18?

jfieb

Merry Christmas to all.......

I believe that Mr. Keynes was correct about animal spirits in general and how they affect markets like the one for Bitcoin. George Akerlof and I expanded on his perspective in our 2009 book Animal Spirits, which argued that the driving force behind human enterprise cannot be reduced to the rational optimization emphasized by traditional economics. Darwinian evolution produced a human species whose behavior sometimes seems to be emotionally driven.


Just a little bit of this for QUIK in '18 is FINE with me.