It's good to keep digital files that you may want in the future, especially since disk space is getting cheaper.
In the case of cryptocurrencies, it is even more interesting, as a wallet file could be worth a lot of monetary value one day.
There have been many stories of the early bitcoin miners who have lost their coins. It is like winning the lottery but the ticket was thrown away.
Back in 2014 and earlier, I had created a GPU mining rig, and at the time, there were so many new coins that kept popping up, so I thought I would mine as many as I could, even trying to mine the coin as soon as it was launched because the difficulty would be at the lowest to start.
Overall, I had mined over 80 different coins. Most of them are completely dead now, or are worth close to nothing. It was really tough to manage so many full node wallets! Eventually, I just archived all the wallet files and decided to not touch them until sometime in the future.
Recently, after seeing Dash price rocket from the start of the year, I wondered if I had mined some DarkCoin (former Dash) back in 2014. Looking through the archive, I found a wallet file!
I downloaded the latest Dash client and restored the wallet file, and had it sync. Good thing was that the file was still compatible with the latest client. I saw I had mined 3.91 of them! I didn't even remember as I kept trying to mine everything left and right back then.
Here's what the Dash client looks like today:
Well, I've restored a few other wallets from my archive, prioritizing the ones that I recognize still exist today. Some of them are really hard to find current peers on the network or any new development news or exchanges that still trade it. Some even have the same name as a different coin, like ByteCoin. Yet others had done a coin relaunch, with a coin swap on a participating exchange that I didn't know about and missed. This was the case of RubyCoin, where it was a short notice of a one week period to swap the old RubyCoin v1 to the new RubyCoin v2 on the Bittrex exchange back in November 2014. Here are the remaining:
It'll be tedious for sure.
