Bitcoinserial: the one about finding your old bitcoin wallet from 2011. Part 1.

*Disclaimer: I'm extremely Bitcoin ignorant. You will see a reference to mining in 2011 and might think, "Wow, started in 2011... carry the one... Bitcoin guru in 2016!"

Nope. Installed Bitcoin-QT on a Mac. Didn't know what I was doing, didn't understand anything. Didn't make a million dollars in five seconds, shut down everything, and also a couple years later spilled soda on the laptop, never touched bitcoin again until joining Steemit recently.*

Present day:

Whenever I think of Bitcoin I wonder to myself, "I wonder how long I was mining on that thing? Was it months? Days?Did I earn 13 cents? 13 dollars? Mystery!"

Like so many other randos wandering around blindly in forums across the land, I too found an old bitcoin wallet on an old laptop from 2011, and have no idea how to bring it back to life. While I am bitcoin ignorant, I'm comfortable on the command-line, installing python packages, etc. So I'm as excited as am I annoyed by the yak shaves I have ahead of me. Just this evening a pywallet script failed because of a mystery python dependency on my old-ass Mac. Delightful! (Needless to say, we're moving this mission over to Linux. Another yak shave. Delightful!)

Like other forum randos, the crux of the mystery is: is the wallet unusable because it's a really old wallet version, or is it unusable because I forget a passphrase?

I'm as curious as you are!

(PS- this blog post is not a solicitation for advice. You're welcome to give it, but I've read 47 blog posts that start out, "I found my old wallet..." and I know you probably need a ton of info from me to give good guidance. Writing this mostly for fun and to make fun of myself and my computing life mess. I also have a feeling this will take a while to figure out... and in the end the wallet's value will be really really small. Delightful! :D)

Stay tuned for Part 2.