As Bitcoin surged from 70.000 USD to 100.000 USD, more and more people have found old wallets or accounts with Bitcoin forgotten about many years ago. For those lucky people, here is a reminder - your old Bitcoin, if you have the keys, is worth a bit more than the price of Bitcoin itself.
A number of altcoins got their start by the developers "forking" the Bitcoin blockchain. Perhaps oversimplified, that means that the same keys and transactions from the Bitcoin blockchain at the time of the fork have been carried forward, but the activity from that point forward has diverged. If you have private keys that control a specific blockchain address for Bitcoin, that same key controls that same address in the alternative blockchain.
For example, if you have a private key a0dc65ffca799873cbea0ac274015b9526505daaaed385155425f7337704883e ...
... and it controls the address 17ZYZASydeA1xyfNrcYcLyqghmK3eGJpHq on the Bitcoin blockchain from before the fork date in 2017, your key also controls the same amount of Bitcoin CASH (a different coin) as you did Bitcoin at the time.
You can see the same pre-2014 transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/17ZYZASydeA1xyfNrcYcLyqghmK3eGJpHq
as on the Bitcoin CASH blockchain
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/bch/17ZYZASydeA1xyfNrcYcLyqghmK3eGJpHq
But wait, there's more!
We aren't necessarily talking much. Bitcoin Cash's current value is around 2% of that of Bitcoin. Bitcoin SV, 1/2 of 1%. Bitcoin Gold - 20% of Bitcoin SV. But depending on your holdings and time, finding the various forks (perhaps using a site like https://forkdrop.io/) and learning how to safely "claim" these coins without compromising your Bitcoin keys may be worth your time.
Sure - compared to 100.000 USD, 475 USD is peanuts. But they are good peanuts to have anyway.
Have you rediscovered keys to Bitcoin from days gone by? There many be more treasures waiting for you!
