Had a little dinner chat with friends tonight about our BTC journeys and how we can back things up.
My earliest address dates back to around mid-2010, but I’m not too keen on sharing that one since I still use it. I do have another address from mid-2011 that had a tiny BTC0.0001 flow through it, which feels pretty insignificant. But it actually kicked off this convo since I just saw it got that small amount on 6/20/2011, which is exactly 15 years ago.
Curious to hear what others have got!
Probably something from 2016, when I received 10k sats from 99bitcoins.com, and lost it to some scammy web wallet.
No, because I just generated some address from a web wallet, received it on-chain, and never saw it again. Maybe on my old, encrypted hard drive, there are some screenshots of it, but it is BIOS-encrypted, and I can no longer open it, to even see the address anymore. I can only scan the blockchain, and guess that one of these 10k outputs are mine, at that time I could locate it exactly, now I don't know, where it is.
Also, there were times, when SIGAINT e-mails were working. Today, they don't, so I can no longer prove, that I received anything.
I still have some addresses from 2019, when I bought some BTCs from ATMs. But I don't use these old addresses anymore, because they were generated by these ATMs. But I still have the private keys to that. Again: signing it would be unwise, because it could prove, what I bought or sold, and when, because of some address reuse.
Anyway, stories like that are fun to read, but dangerous to share. And some of them can be easily faked, for example by finding brainwallets, and signing messages from addresses, which are known to be broken, to pretend, that someone is an early adopter.
I can remember back to Christmas day 2016 having a chat (again) about Bitcoin with a family member
who had previously already been in Bitcoin. I was finally persuaded to get into it but while still skeptical
I committed to a whole $100 worth of a purchase. AFAIK that purchase happened in the first week in
January 2017.
I gave the family member the FIAT and they bought the Bitcoin. I actually cant remember what wallet I
used back then, I think it was an EXODUS wallet or maybe an Electrum one. I still have all the seeds
and passwords saved so I would have to go looking, they are not in use so I could post something if I
went digging - but yea its not as exciting as others who were in years prior like the above!
I wish I had something flex-worthy to share in this thread, but my first transaction was only somewhere in early 2017 (a few months before I registered on this forum) and the funniest thing is I couldn't prove even that because for a long time I just held it on Bittrex, after purchasing it on Localbitcoins and transfering to Bittrex, and both of those no longer exist...
Not even flex worthy. Just kind of an interesting discussion.
Outside of the 2 addresses I mentioned in the OP, there are probably hundreds of addresses I used over the years that would be just about impossible to prove I owned.
So if I had ever actually spent the funds from the 2010 and still did not want to show it was mine and lost the private key from the 2011 one I would be in 2014 or 15 range.
*Since someone asked no I have never spent anything from the 2010 address it just has about 60 smallish inputs. Not even enough BTC to come after me for a $5 ($8 with inflation) wrench attack. But I just don't want it out there.
-Dave
Back in October 2016: Worked on KTN token and received a payment of 0.2 BTC for it.
Later, there were also transactions related to bounties or presales, which brought back those old memories. Those wallets used for the transactions are no longer in use, as newer wallets are now preferred for exchange compatibility and security reasons.
I don't have such an old history like you, but I remember talking to friends about 2016.
First transaction was on February or March 2020. I remember I used a faucet to receive ~1,000 sats, to test Electrum wallet. I burned them on mining fees. Then, when I felt comfortable, I sent over my $400, which was all my savings back then, to a trader I found online for bitcoin. It was peer-to-peer trade with no escrow, and he could have easily scammed me, but he didn't.
A new journey began at that day.
Nothing as impressive as 2010 or 2011 for me. The oldest address I can still remember goes back to around 2015 when I first got involved with MMM. It was quite popular at the time and, for many people, that was their first exposure to Bitcoin.
Unfortunately, I don't have access to that address anymore, so I can't prove anything. Looking back though, it's interesting how something that started with MMM eventually led me deeper into Bitcoin and the broader crypto space.
We share a much similar history because it was from joining this forum I got my first CEX wallet and learned to trade with it while perfecting the knowledge. Binance has been the oldest and best exchange for me so far even though their service is restricted in my country but I remembered receiving my first payment in Bitcoin there which I traded to my local fiat currency using the then Remitano.
BYBiT, Bitget, Electrum wallet, Exodus wallet, ledger wallet all came along the way and I can say it has been one good experience learning and unlearning and relearning the best practices, while performing newer Bitcoin transactions including payments, investments and trades with these exchanges till date.
I no longer have access to my old wallet because my first interaction with Bitcoin was not serious; I usually learned about bitcoin through faucets, and all of my BTC addresses, including the keys, were lost after I accidentally formatted the hard disk. I tried to recover them, but I could only recover a few keys, so I lost hope of accessing my old wallets.
So I don't have anything that I could prove myself that I started 2014 only signing message is I think the way to prove you are here in crypto since that year.
Well, Binance is new to me; it is not the oldest one. OKX is one of the oldest, well-known exchanges nowadays. It was OKcoin rebranded to OKEx, and then rebranded again to OKX. Compared to Binance, OKX was established in the year 2013, and Binance's launch year was 2017. So I use OKX more than Binance before.
i have signed mining payout addys from mid 2011 that i still control. back in the day i signed a bunch of addys for tax purposes and proof of how i made it (like signed messages saying mined on this pool with this gear in this timeframe) if i ever need to prove where i had got my coin from.
figured it might come in useful.
The earliest address I can prove ownership of is from March 2016. I wouldn't bother signing anything with it because it has no particular prestige or reputation associated with it.
Oh, wowza. I knew you'd been around for a while, but I'd no idea you were an old school bitcoiner.
My earliest BTC? If my memory serves me correctly--and lately that's a hit-or-miss proposition--it was one I got from a web wallet in order to use a faucet (BTW, do any of you not remember or know of faucets?). The wallet provider's name was a weird one, and it's almost on the tip of my tongue. Not Xapo, and I hadn't tried Mycelium yet, which isn't a web wallet anyway.....goddamn, this is going to drive me nuts!
What's also going to drive me nuts is trying to think of the name of that faucet. I remember just getting a very small amount of sats per claim but being all excited that I was figuring out how to use bitcoin. This wasn't ages ago, either--we're talking 2015 or maybe even 2014. Grrrrrr.
From 2014 and it was a faucet payout (0.001-0.002 BTC) but even though that address is empty today but I still don't see any reason to want to provide proof for anyone. They would just have to take my word for it
Maybe it was QoinPro.
It was weird, it was a web wallet and it had a faucet or rather a give away where they paid something like 0.001 BTC to the users to try their stuff out. They didn't last long.
There is no reason just more wondering about who would and would not and how far back some people go.
As I said I will not show my oldest (till I move the funds out) but if needed would have no issues showing the one from 2011.
It also made me wonder how many people even could. Good or bad how many people trashed their old wallet.dat files and never did a dump of the private keys.
There are some addresses of mine that I don't think I could find the PKs or wallet.dat file even if I had to at this point.
Could probably go to https://bitlist.co/search and search some addresses that have been tied to me and ask me to prove a bunch of and I could not.
Just one of those things. I thought I was better at saving some of them. But I was not as careful as I thought.
-Dave
I am a hoarder when it comes to files and data, so naturally I kept everything. My old keys (some of them empty) and related wallet files are stored on a USB disk, encrypted and kept in a safe place. I even have my blockchain.info wallet.aes.json file stored somewhere in there.
I even have some of the craziest wallets of altcoins like RDD (Reddcoin) that is already dead, or Byteball which I liked the project but the price is dumped so much (from $700 to $5) that it might as well be dead.
You did the right things, perhaps by your own careful thinking and practice or by listened to the advice from Satoshi Nakamoto. The founder recommended that Bitcoin users should never delete their wallets.
By any reasons for doing that, it's actual your good practice.
I am not old and have no wallet or address open before 2024. I created my address in mid 2024 and there I earn bitcoins by working on signature campaigns and I have not transferred any bitcoins to my address from any other site. I don't feel the need to sign my address here because I am still using my address. I currently have no bitcoins deposited in my address I have traded my bitcoins from my address to my exchange.
Looking at the title and how long the years involved, I was thinking maybe I will see like 100 to 1000 Bitcoins, since by 2011 it's value was still very cheap, but only to be surprised and shocked when I saw 0.0001 BTC as the first Bitcoin transaction you ever made, of which it's kind of okay too to have had such experience when the world least thought it will skyrocket to be this valuable today. However, I will like to ask, how did you get that 0.0001 BTC back then in 2011? Did you earn it from a Bitcoin Faucet, mine it ? Moreover, happy 15years first Bitcoin transaction anniversary to you.
My first Bitcoin transaction was around 2018, when I did not know anything about it. I only wanted to make free money from it, I did not even plan to hold it, just wanted to make income for free haha. At that time it was a thing here that people loved to create content on YouTube about how you can make money for free using your internet and computer resources, so I landed on Bitcoin virtual mining sites where I had to click the mining button every 8 hours, and some sites had to be kept open.
But I made nothing. I just hope I would have known better and instead I would have bought some, but I was a student and had nothing in my pockets except my money to eat haha, which I used for the internet. Anywhere I went, whatever I tried to search to make a consistent flow of money, I ended up needing a skill, which at that time I had none. I tried to learn many things.
Anyway, I used a browser at that time which was using my resources like mining and was paying me sats. I only took one payment once I met the threshold and at that time it was in cents and now it is 1 dollar haha. The wallet was created on Blockchain Wallet, I still have the login. Anyway, it does not matter, the amount was too low and I was not even interested in BTC, but when I joined the forum and slowly understood its potential I started buying it at the start of 2022.