Here are the latest items and commentary on current economics news, market trends, stocks, investing opportunities, and the precious metals markets. We also cover hedges, derivatives, and obscura. And it bears mention that most of these items are from the “tangibles heavy” contrarian perspective of JWR. (SurvivalBlog’s Founder and Senior Editor.) Today’s focus is on Bitcoin recovery expert David Veksler. (See the Cryptos section.)
Precious Metals:
First up, over at Sharps Pixley: Lawrie Williams: Russia May Now be World’s No. 2 Gold Miner
Cryptos (David Veksler):
One of my regular consulting clients in the American Redoubt recently told me a tale of woe with a very happy ending. Here is how “Bob” told it to me. (Pardon any factual errors, because I’m relating all of this second hand): In early 2012 Bitcoin cost a relative pittance — less than $10 USD would buy an entire Bitcoin (BTC). So, on a whim, Bob invested $100 in Bitcoin. That bought him around 13.5 BTC. Then he essentially forgot about it, until in early 2017 he heard news that the Bitcoin market was heating up. The news? The cost of buying 1 BTC exceeded $1,000. That really caught his eye.
Bob remembered that he had his Bitcoin wallet stored on an old laptop computer that had died back around 2015, due to a failed motherboard. He also realized that he probably hadn’t made a copy of the Bitcoin wallet, and he only had a vague recollection of the passphrase that he had chosen. Now in a minor panic, he removed the dead laptop’s hard drive and attached it to a “sled” disk drive USB adapter, and connected it to his new laptop. He was not a happy camper when he found that the old laptop’s 250 GB drive was corrupted and only about half of the files were working. But at least he saw a “wallet.dat” file. He breathed a sigh of relief and copied that wallet file to several 4GB memory sticks, and put them in various safe places.