I got .20-someodd (.28, maybe? Maybe have even been in the .3 range.) years ago from spigots and a very brief experiment with mining, then thoughtlessly formatted right over the damn hard drive with the wallet on it and went "oh well, not like it's worth anything".

Don't suppose there are any low-level wallet-finder tools out there in case it hasn't been overwritten? It's finally worth a couple days to give that a shot on all my old hard drives (I forgot which one it was long ago, which is part of why it hasn't been worth it so far).

After I upgraded, I gave my Xeon Workstation to my Mother and actually kept the miner running when I gave it to her. She complained it was a bit slow, when she used Photoshop, so I turned the miner off and she was happy. There must have been something like 300 or 400 coins in that wallet.

I should ask her if she still has it next time I see her, but I am pretty sure she threw it in the garbage.

If it exists, you should ask her today. 300 coins is ~$3M.

Probably. I actually wrote one about half a decade ago, though I'm not sure how well it works with recent or really old versions of the software: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25091.0

That would actually be hilarious if a suffisent number of geeks tried to cash in the bitcoin that is dormant somewhere massively and at the exact same time.

This could well end the Ponzi scheme in a victorious way because people that mined them from almost nothing could extract a lot of real money from people (mostly speculators) who bought recently while totally tanking the valuation.

Wait... maybe that was always the plan... Is bitcoin actually a huge planned «Robin Hood» bubble?

Sounds about right. I paid 500 euros for my 0.05BTC piece of history (there were some fees and all that of course).

Maybe I just bought a piece of something like the Berlin wall and when everything goes to shit and this whole train wreck evolves into something more sane later on in 100 years or whatever, my grand children can sell my 0.05BTC on Sothebys or something :D ..

I went through all my old blockchain.info temporary wallets from 2014 in gmail the other day to collect the spare change I left in them at the time that is now worth $2k. Took 9hrs to confirm moving them, which is ridiculous. Guess it's time to switch to Monero or Zcash for use as a currency.