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I did a similar stunt with an old PowerBook where I electrically disabled the WiFi/Bluetooth so it wouldn’t be online unless I plugged in Ethernet, generated keys, and played around with mining. This was back in 2010 when this was all just basically toys for fun. I also encrypted it all with FileVault.

Then I forgot my pass phrase and have never been able to recover any of it. I don’t even know how many btc were mined/lost.

Before anyone asks, no, there aren’t any usable exploits / vulns found for the encryption methods used. And from what I can tell the coins in question have still sat frozen for going in a decade and a half now. I suspect many other hackers did the same thing…

 help



Apparently legacy filevault can be attacked offline with tools like john the ripper.

If you were attempting to mine Bitcoin with a PowerBook I can confidently say you mined zero Bitcoin

Edit: I thought he was talking about 2012 but yeah in 2010 CPU mining was still a thing


Wasn't the difficulty like 6 orders of magnitude easier back then?

Okay maybe in 2010 you could use a CPU but even by 2012 it was entirely dominated by GPUs and I think even dedicated hardware was coming out around that time or soon after

ehhh you could CPU mine in the early months IIRC. The issue was that 50BTC wasn't even worth a penny back then lol



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