In 2011, a quiet IT guy named Sam works late nights fixing printers and rebooting office routers no one else understands. One evening, scrolling a tech forum between help desk calls, he stumbles on a thread titled:
“Bitcoin: The Future of Money or Nerd Fantasy?”
He reads. Shrugs.
“Why not?”
Downloads the wallet software, mines a few coins on his work computer, and buys $25 worth for the fun of it. Ends up with about 170 BTC.
He forgets about it.
The next year, Sam moves. New job, new laptop, life goes on. The old PC? Left in a cardboard box in his mom’s garage, next to his high school yearbooks and a dusty box of floppy disks.
Years pass.
Sam gets married. Has a kid. Buys a house. Loses his dad. Life happens — beautiful, messy, ordinary.
It’s 2025 now.
Sam’s mom is downsizing. “Can you come clean out the garage?” she texts.
He spends a Saturday knee-deep in memories and old tech. Then he sees it: the old tower PC. Heavy. Beige. Dead.
Out of curiosity, he hauls it home, powers it up. Surprisingly, it boots.
Buried in an ancient folder called “weirdcoin_stuff”:
A wallet.dat file.
Heart racing, he searches online.
Restores the file with help from Reddit and a USB stick.
Wallet loads.
170 BTC.
Market price: $68,000 per coin.
Total: $11.5 million.
Sam stares at the number.
No cheering. No dancing. Just… silence.
He walks into the kitchen, pours himself a coffee, sits down.
His wife sees his face. “What happened?”
He slides the laptop across the table. “Remember that weird internet money I told you about years ago?”
She looks.
Pauses.
And just says:
“…we’re paying off the house today, right?”
Sam nods.
Bitcoin didn’t change his life overnight.
