John is an old high school friend I mostly see at weddings, so I wasn’t expecting to see a message from him blinking on my desktop one night in December. He asked if I still had the Bitcoin he’d given me back in 2011.

“I still have it I think,” I replied, dimly recalling the loonie-sized brass coin that he’d given me, around the time someone bought a pizza for 10,000 BTC.

I remembered seeing some recent headlines about Bitcoin making a comeback. “How much is it worth now?” I asked, thinking that for him to be asking, it must be worth a couple of hundred bucks.

“13,000 USD-ish,” he said.

I figured he must be joking. So I googled it—and sure enough, 1 BTC was trading for US$11,850 that day. On the Canadian exchanges, it hit a high of C$15,323.

I tore through old boxes of odds and ends I’d hoarded over the years. I found the coin mixed in with some euro pocket change, with the unmistakable B with vertical slashes embossed on it. The coin itself was worthless of course, but the cryptographic private key printed on the back, underneath a tamperproof holographic sticker, was linked to an anonymous digital wallet holding 1.0 BTC.

How do I sell this thing?

Discovering I hadn’t thrown it out brought a momentary wave of relief, followed by acute anxiety, as I realized the single coin in my hand could buy a new Ford Fiesta, and I had no idea what to do with it. Obviously I couldn’t just sell my coin for cash —I’d have to figure out how to redeem it online, then sell it on an exchange. But what software was I supposed to use? Which of the thousands of totally unregulated businesses out there should I trust to store and process my money? What if in my fumbling illiteracy I deleted my keys or opened myself up to hackers? And what if I took too long figuring it out, and the Bitcoin bubble popped before I could sell?

As you might guess, I’m about as far from a high-risk investor as you could get. Even back in 2011, Bitcoin seemed far too speculative for me. At the time, John was starting up a Bitcoin mining operation, and was looking for locations to set up his mining rigs (they look a lot like server racks, but with as many GPUs packed into them as possible to get the most parallel processing power). My apartment had a lot of extra space, and I was living in a shoddy old building where the noise and heat wouldn’t be much of a problem, so it seemed like a good match. John asked if I wanted my cut in Bitcoin or cash, and I said cash, without hesitation. Of course I thought cryptocurrency was a neat idea, but I was more than happy to let savvier folks do the pioneering; me, I needed money to pay my rent and student loans. I took the brass Bitcoin as a small fraction of my first payout, more as a memento than anything. Then in 2014, the biggest Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, went bellyup, and I was sure we’d heard the last of all this cryptocurrency stuff. I held on to the coin because I hold on to everything, and ended up being perhaps the least prepared investor in the Great Bitcoin Gold Rush of 2017. Casascius, my paper wallet and the unconfirmed transaction I spent the morning after John contacted me watching YouTube videos on what to do with my coin. I learned that it was a Casascius coin, one of roughly 3,500 minted by a Bitcoin user of the same name before the US Treasury Department shut him down in 2013 for failing to have a federal money transmitter license. The 22-digit hash string, safely hidden behind the peel-away sticker on the back, works on the same principle as a “paper wallet,” a tool used by serious Bitcoiners for secure long-term storage. Essentially, any wallet address out there in the cloud is secured with a public and private key, both of which are needed to access the funds. A bit like a PIN, the private key can be stored offline in a text file or even on a piece of paper locked in a safe, where hackers can’t get to it. Multiple websites had warned me not share my private key with anyone, since they could use it to trade away my Bitcoins. Who’d have thought a bunch of cryptography nuts would be so paranoid about security?

Peeling back the sticker on my coin felt eerily like rolling up the rim on a Tim Horton’s cup. After several fruitless hours trying to find a client that still accepted the ancient technology of hash strings —modern, user-friendly wallets like Coinbase use 12 word passphrases instead of 22-digit keys to secure wallets— I ended up with a more technical client that could “sweep” the funds in my paper wallet. I clicked a bunch of buttons I didn’t fully understand, and the wallet showed a “transaction” moving 0.9972838 BTC from my paper wallet to my digital one, after transaction fees. I breathed a sigh of relief. The balance in my wallet still said zero. I wasn’t alarmed at first, since the transaction was marked “unconfirmed.” I figured it would take a few minutes to an hour to process. I started to get concerned when it was still pending the next day. I checked the rates again: Bitcoin was up to $17,512 CAD. I couldn’t help but feel like it could pop at any second. I googled “unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions” and discovered a litany of complaints from users who spent hours or days waiting to get their money. Some dated as far back as 2013, but they really started spiking in 2016 and 2017, as the value of Bitcoin was reaching to new all time highs. From what I could naively gather, it seemed the Bitcoin network slowed down as interest in it increased, and the more users were trying to trade, the more the pipes got clogged. But the assurances other users received on the forums gave me comfort —serious Bitcoiners seem to say that delays didn’t usually last more than a day or two, and I would eventually get my money. Will I ever get my money? It was about then that I made a fateful mistake: I queued up a second transaction to move my Bitcoin from my wallet to an exchange where I could sell it. My thinking was that whenever the first transaction did complete, the second would begin automatically, even if I wasn’t there to check on it. Seems logical, right?