I've been in crypto and Bitcoin ten years now, and here's the weirdest thing I've ever done, which I don't really want to admit to. I'd love to hear everybody else's weird stories too and see what y'all have done, so consider this me going first.
The lost wallet that started it
Back in 2017, there was a guy who used to mine Bitcoin and lost his wallet file, and it had about 103 Bitcoin in it. At the time I filmed this, that was worth over six million dollars, and nothing had happened with that address in years. It hasn't done anything in a long time. He said anyone is welcome to it: "I've given up trying." So that's permission, although technically anyone could post that.
Why would somebody post that in 2017? The Bitcoin price was a lot lower back then. The way I look at it is, okay, somebody gave permission that if you can get into that wallet, you can have it.
So at the same time, I had just bought a pendulum from the crystal shop downtown, and I was into all these esoteric practices, which I still am. Things like downloading information from the ether, the Akashic Record, directly into your mind. Long story short, I got the idea that I could just download the private key to this wallet directly into my mind, and that using the pendulum would help get it into reality, where I could then have this 103 Bitcoin be my own.
The pendulum, and why I thought it could work
Now, there were a lot of small problems with this. Besides whether you could do it or not, here's the idea behind using a pendulum: you can get at answers that consciously might be difficult, but subconsciously you know. The little momentum in your body, the little thoughts you have that may be below the surface, will impact the pendulum.
So I got this pendulum out, and I'm sitting there, and I didn't tell anybody about this either. I'm sitting in the office by myself with this pendulum, and the first thing I tried was, can I use this pendulum to predict the future? Can I ask the pendulum if the price of Bitcoin will be higher in two minutes? I tried that, and it didn't work.
And then I was thinking, yeah, I'll just download it, because I get kind of euphoric sometimes about what I'm capable of, and then often crash back down to earth. But the benefit of that is I often do push into areas that other people don't think are possible. This one, so far, turned out to be a little too far.
The plan: pulling a 256-digit private key out of my mind
So what I tried to do — well, I initially was thinking I could just straight up take each digit directly out of my mind through the pendulum. Ask it, was it a one or a zero? Because these are ultimately 256-digit binary private keys. When you get down to the bottom of it, a private key is just 256 zeros or ones in a row. With a pendulum, that'd be pretty easy. I just ask 256 questions in a row: "Is the first digit of this Bitcoin wallet address a zero?" And if the pendulum says yes, I'll write zero. If it says no, I write one.
Well, it turns out it isn't super easy to take those 256 digits and put them straight into a usable private key. I did finally figure it out, but it took some research just to see how to do that. But before any of that, I realized I ought to do a simple test first. I should grab my own private key out of my own wallet and see if the pendulum can tell me my own private key.
Testing it on my own wallet — and failing
So I got my own private key out of my own Bitcoin wallet and turned it into the 256 digits, zeros or ones. I get on the pendulum, I'm sitting on the floor, I'm all excited, I'm like, all right, I'm going to prove this works. And it didn't work. It would not give me my own private key out of my own Bitcoin wallet. And I was devastated.
I went back and forth on this idea for months. I'd get all excited, and I'd do the next step to research it — like figuring out how to get the 256-digit raw binary into an actual key you could use in a wallet. I kind of did this in steps. But the grand finale of it was sitting there asking the pendulum, and I had actually seen the key too. I literally had seen my own key in zeros and ones in my wallet. So I looked at it and I'm like, what's the tenth digit, zero or one? And the pendulum gives me the wrong answer. I'm like, wow, I just wasted so much time on this.
Why the idea still isn't totally dead
And there's still part of me that thinks maybe it's not totally lost. Maybe you just weren't doing the pendulum right. Maybe you need to dream each individual digit, because I've heard stories of people dreaming the lottery numbers and winning the lottery off of dreaming the lottery numbers. So, believe it or not, this idea is still not totally dead in my head — that maybe I could just dream the private key.
I've seen weird, magical things happen, things you might find unbelievable. So to me it gets to be very much like, okay, this is the key, I'm going to do this, this is definitely possible that I could remote view the private key to this wallet. The question is just, how do I do that?
The bigger question: do you even want it?
But ironically, I also got into a more esoteric question: do you really want it? Let's assume I did successfully pull the private key for this wallet. Now I've suddenly got 103 Bitcoin, which at the time was six and a half million dollars. Well, how are you going to explain how you got a hold of that Bitcoin?
In theory, I was thinking, I'd be happy to give half of it back to the guy who lost it. But how could you prove who actually lost it? And how could you prove that it isn't somebody else's legitimate Bitcoin? Couldn't somebody else come along and say, "Hey, this guy stole my private key, that's my Bitcoin"? Anybody who's watching this address could see if the Bitcoin moved or not. It looks like this was mining Bitcoin back around 2011 when all the coins came in and got stacked up, and nothing has been sent out of it. It looks like people have even sent some Bitcoin to this wallet as a kind of tip, like, "Hey, look how much your Bitcoin is worth now."
And I realized it'd actually be very problematic if I did successfully get a hold of this Bitcoin. Because if you start to do some supernatural ability like that, and I'm very committed to openness and honesty and transparency, then I would have to tell everybody I did that. It wouldn't be right to keep it secret. But then if I tell everybody, that sets up somebody else claiming, "Hey, you stole my Bitcoin." Then how do I pay tax on it? I didn't buy it, I just kind of got a hold of it. And then what happens when some of the people in, say, the CIA find out, "Hey, this guy just remote viewed a Bitcoin private key"? They'd need to go knock on his door and pay him a visit, because if he can remote view Bitcoin private keys, that's dangerous, and we need to put a lid on that. So, ironically, one key reason I look at why I haven't actually done this is because it's surprisingly very problematic if I really did pull it off.
That whole tangent of esoteric questions is honestly where my favorite Bitcoin stories live, and I keep going down those roads in my conversation with God about Bitcoin, crypto, and the ICP price. If that side of crypto speaks to you, you can get me one-on-one about it inside the Jerry Banfield Family.
Why a magic windfall might ruin your life anyway
I'm very much into how magical life is — that we can do anything, that we are God and we're creating this universe. What I like to do is try to set my magic upon things that will be convenient and that won't be reality-destroying. It's the magic of life, but at the same time, if you cross certain lines, it really could blow your whole existing reality up.
Suddenly getting 103 Bitcoin would do that. I've had a lifetime of being in debt. Even if I just sold a few hundred thousand dollars worth of this Bitcoin and paid the tax on it, I'd be debt free. I'd pay off my house loan, my business loans, my wife's student loans — we'd be debt free. And ironically, in some ways that makes things too easy. I remember thinking that if I could win the lottery, if I could dream the lottery numbers, I wouldn't want to, because winning the lottery often destroys people's lives. And if I did pull this 103 Bitcoin, I can imagine there'd be a bunch of people asking me for money — my friends, my family — and that could be really annoying.
But also, our struggles and our challenges often give a lot of meaning to our lives. Sometimes a magic solution — you'd think you would wish for a magic solution to the things in your life, but really, often the things in your life are self-created. I self-created this financial situation, and a magic wand just deleting all of it isn't necessarily the gift it looks like.
The magic wand I actually chose
The way I look at it, the Internet Computer is the magic wand that's going to give me this in a way that's very authentic and transparent. I look at it that Internet Computer is going to give me this value, where there's not going to be any financial concerns ever again in my life, because of Internet Computer protocols. So I've managed to manifest that in a different way that's much more convenient — and that other people can do too.
Whereas if I pull some Bitcoin private key out of the ether — well, the amount of possible Bitcoin private keys is something like 10 to the 83rd power, a one with 83 zeros after it. It's pretty much impossible to guess. I've actually found websites that constantly generate tons of Bitcoin private keys, and they've never found a single address with any Bitcoin in it at all. Those websites can run indefinitely, and more than likely they'll never find one address with Bitcoin in it. If you want the longer version of how I got from chasing impossible windfalls to a strategy that actually works, I've laid it out in how I went from $0 to crypto millionaire without buying Bitcoin or altcoins, and that CIA tangent above is its own rabbit hole in if the CIA created Bitcoin, ICP makes even more sense.
What this weird experiment actually taught me
So I am grateful that, as weird as this experience was, I learned a lot from it. I pushed my mental boundaries. I dared to think something was possible that most people would think is impossible. And I love that my thinking is that open — I seriously was focused on, and believed, that somebody else essentially gave this Bitcoin to me, and that I could even help them recover it.
I hope this has been one of the more interesting stories you've ever heard about crypto, which is why I've shared it. If you enjoyed it, you can keep up with my newest videos in my Money playlist. And if you've got your own weird crypto story, come share it with me — I read and reply to every one inside the community.