Back in 2013, I did a bit of BTC mining for just a few days. I think I managed to pull in around 1 BTC daily, and now I’m trying to remember where I did that. I reached out to Bitminter, but there’s only a small amount there, about a hundred bucks. The name GUIMiner rings a bell, kind of like Bitminter, but I lost my BTC address. I’m wondering if there’s a way to check if I had an account on GUIMiner using my old email, like I did with Bitminter.
Bitminter’s support is cool; they’re sending me the leftover funds from my account, but I’m on the hunt for those other BTC stashed somewhere in a mining program or pool. I used to mine on my parents' iMac and my brother’s Windows PC, and I think I used similar software for both. Any ideas? Or can anyone help?
I might have been in the deepbit pool, but I can’t remember for sure.
Didn't you give the mining pool a Bitcoin address back in the days, to send your 1BTC per day to?
So they're still paying 4 years after they shut down? That's impressive!
Something doesn't quite add up to your story but it could also be because you didn't provide all details. Just some ballpark calculations I made, because your statement to mine about one Bitcoin per day made me a bit suspicious (I mined in 2011 a bit, so I've some little experience from those days).
To mine about one Bitcoin per day you would've needed roughly 1/3600 of total network hashrate (roughly 144 blocks per day with 25BTC block subsidy in 2013; I'm neglecting transaction fees).
Now, in second half of 2013 network hashrate really started to skyrocket. Let's assume you mined at the beginning of 2013 where network average hashrate was at minimum ~21TH/s upto ~150TH/s by end of June 2013. Let's take for sake of easy round numbers 36TH/s average network hashrate, giving us nicely round numbers for this ballpark calculation:
with those premisses of 36TH/s network hashrate you would've needed to mine with an own hashrate of roughly 10GH/s!
This would've needed quite a few GPUs. Not sure which mining gear you used, AFAIR it was the dawn of FPGAs and maybe first ASICs at the second half of 2013 because by the end of 2013 network average hashrate was already at ~9,500TH/s.
Why do I bring this up? In my opinion you would've needed some serious mining gear to get one Bitcoin per day. Or did you use some "cloud mining", like cex.io or so?
I didn't use a lot of different mining pools in 2011, but usually when you mine to a pool, your mining account is your own Bitcoin public address to which you withdraw your mined coins based on your proportion of share of hashrate.
You would have used GUIMiner, and configured it to use a pool, or solo mine. Either way you needed a wallet address to send the bitcoins to, so If you don't have a wallet.dat file or a private key, or the pool you used, or access to the original computers you mined on to retrieve these, then you are out of luck.
If you signed up with a mining pool, they might have sent you an email confirmation. Do you still have access to whatever email account you were using back then?
GUIMiner was the mining software. You wouldn't have a GUIMiner account. However, if you were mining solo you would have been using Bitcoin-Qt, though it is very unlikely that you ever found a block.
Either way, look for a wallet.dat file on the computer.
BTW, there is no way that you could have earned 1 BTC/day mining on an iMac in 2013. Maybe 0.001 BTC or 0.01 BTC, depending on when you were mining.