It’s Sunday, so it’s throwback time again. A few weeks ago, in the story of my first Bitcoin buy, I mentioned that one of the four skeptics from that weekend in Italy ended up building my Dogecoin miners. Today I’m paying off that line. This one has free electricity, a wooden GPU rack, a coin worth $10 that turned into a car, and a password I have been trying to remember for over a decade.
The Skeptic Who Wanted Miners
Back in March 2013, four friends from Nijmegen visited my poker house in Italy and listened to me ramble about Bitcoin all weekend. None of them bought. Then Bitcoin ran from $44 to over $1,000 by the end of that year, and one of them changed his tune. He never asked me how to buy coins, though. But he kept bugging me about miners.
He was the technical one of the group, the guy who builds his own PCs. Mining made sense to him in a way that buying coins from a stranger on Skype never did. So in 2014 I asked him to build me five Bitcoin miners. He built five, and I gifted him one as payment. That left four rigs for me, and one very expensive question: where do you plug them in?
The Mining Dilemma of 2014
In the 2013 to 2015 days, almost everyone who learned about Bitcoin got interested in mining. Use your computer to mine magic internet money, then sell it for profit. Sounds amazing, right?
In theory, yes. In practice your electricity bill ran up to the point where the mined coins barely paid for the power. So you had to hold and wait for the price to go up before you made anything. But if you have to gamble on the price anyway, you might as well buy the coins directly and skip the hardware. See the dilemma?
Free Electricity Solves the Math
One of my closest friends had rented a big office for his business. Industrial space, dozens of offices in one building. The funny part was that the rent had electricity included. Nobody tracked power usage per office. We figured the landlord would never notice a spike on the total property, and nothing in the rental agreement said anything about power consumption. So, free electricity. That solved the math for us.
We decided to run the four miners there and see how it went.
The rig. Four Sapphire GPUs on a wooden frame my friend built, two power supplies, and a sign on the wall that already knew where we came from.
The structure was clean. We were not stacking coins. Every few days we sold whatever the miners had produced and split the profit. Mine the coin, sell the coin, repeat.
From Bitcoin to Litecoin to Dogecoin
At first we pointed the rigs at Bitcoin. It did not pay as much as we hoped. Mining competition was already fierce in 2014, and GPUs were losing the race against dedicated hardware. So we did what every small miner did that year. We hunted for altcoins.
Then tried Litecoin. After we tried Feathercoin. And eventually we landed on Dogecoin, which in early 2014 was the fun coin everyone tipped each other with on Reddit. We joined mining pools, let the rigs run, and waited for the payouts to roll in. Every few days a new batch of DOGE hit the wallet, we sold it, and we split the cash.
Was it life changing money? No. Was it fun? Absolutely. There is something about watching a wooden rack of GPUs hum in a rented office and knowing it prints internet money for free.
The $10 Wallet We Never Sold
We shut the miners down in 2015. The math stopped working even with free power, and we both had other things going on. When we cleaned up, one wallet was left over with roughly 400,000 DOGE in it.
It was worth about $10 at the time. I told my friend I would keep it, no point selling. I paid him his $5 share and kept the wallet. Ten dollars. I’m sure we laughed about it.
The wallet today. 394,000 DOGE, five pool payouts from February and March 2014, and a balance I can see but not touch.
Now picture 2014 me, setting up what I considered a dust wallet. I did not write down the password. Or maybe I did, on a laptop or a phone I no longer control. Either way, the password is gone.
At the 2021 peak, Dogecoin traded close to a dollar. That made it a wallet worth almost $400,000 that I could not access. Today it still holds enough to buy a new car. And I still don’t have access.
Billions of Guesses, Zero Access
I did not give up quietly. I hired a legitimate wallet recovery team and let them brute force it. They ran a few billion passwords against it. No luck.
The frustrating part is that I have the wallet.dat file. I can open it in Dogecoin Core, see the full history, watch the balance sit there. Everything works except the one thing that matters. To send a single coin I need that password.
So once a year I take another shot. I list every password pattern I used back then, run a fresh brute force with the new variations, and hope. Every year, nothing. Who knows, maybe I crack it the year Dogecoin hits $10.
It is also why I preach seed phrase and passphrase backups to everyone who will listen. The lesson cost me a car so far. It might cost me a house.
It Was Never a $400K Loss
Here is the honest part. People hear this story and assume I lie awake over it. I don’t, and I never have.
What I actually lost was $10. Through laziness, sloppiness, call it what you want. A dust wallet that did not deserve five seconds of my attention in 2015, and got exactly that.
I did not even think about it for years. Then Dogecoin peaked in 2021 and somewhere in my head a light went on. Wait, don’t I have a wallet somewhere with some DOGE in it? I dug up the wallet file, opened it, saw the balance, and got asked for a password I did not remember. I chuckled. Of course. Of course this is how it goes.
And let’s be real about the counterfactual. If I had access to that wallet the whole time, I would never have held 400,000 DOGE all the way to $400,000. The moment it hit $10,000 I probably would have sold it and bought something fun. I would not have caught the top either. Nobody does. So there was never a $400K loss to begin with. There was a $10K trade I never got to make.
Forced holding by no access is the easiest diamond hand strategy in crypto. It is also the only one that has ever worked for me.
Mining Never Fully Left
Whatever happens with that wallet, mining was a fun chapter in my crypto journey. In 2017 I built an Ethereum miner and ran that for a while. And even today I have a small Bitcoin miner on my desk. Low hash rate, no real profit, just my tiny contribution to the network. Who knows, maybe one day I hit the miner lottery and find 3.2 BTC in my wallet.
Dogecoin, meanwhile, is still around. Still the one meme coin on its own chain, still holding the number one spot on my meme coin list after all these years. Not bad for a joke coin we mined for beer money in a rented office. And even today, in 2026 while I write this, I’m still trading memes and still hunting the next Doge or the next Pepe. Some habits you never shut down.
Final Words
The skeptic who didn’t buy Bitcoin in Italy built the rigs that mined my Dogecoin. The friend with free electricity made the math work. And 2014 me, who thought $10 of DOGE was not worth writing a password down for, is the reason I can still open that wallet and only look at it.
Every crypto veteran has a lost wallet story. Mine happens to sit in plain sight, balance visible, one password away, and I’ve made peace with it. If you take one thing from this Sunday, take this: write the password down. Even for the dust wallet. Especially for the dust wallet.
Want more stories from the early days? The full collection lives in the Morten crypto archives.
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