A Photo Worth Millions

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I remember the night when my fortune had vanished in thin air.

A few years ago, out of curiosity, I bought a few bitcoins — they were cheap back then.

To store them safely, I created a digital wallet using an app. It gave me a seed phrase: twelve random words that act as the master key to the wallet. Anyone with those words can access my bitcoins, so that seed phrase must be kept secret.

I wrote the seed phrase on a piece of paper and snapped a photo with my phone.

But I never uploaded that photo anywhere — not to Google Drive, not to iCloud. I’d heard the stories of hackers breaking into cloud accounts. One leak, one hacker, and all my bitcoins could be gone.

And, that was my first mistake.

That photo stayed on my phone as a forgotten secret for years — until the day I upgraded my phone.

I have this irresistible urge to start fresh whenever I get a new device, so I set it up from scratch with no data carried over from the old phone.

“The important stuff is already in the cloud, right?” I assured myself.

And, this was my second mistake.

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Then came December 2017 — the month Bitcoin made its biggest leap. A single coin hit $20,000! Suddenly, everyone was talking about Bitcoin — even my uncle, who calls every app a “website”.

I remembered that I owned a few bitcoins. But my stomach sank as the truth hit me: the photo of my wallet seed was gone. My Bitcoin wallet, then worth hundreds of thousands, was locked in a digital vault I could no longer open.

What followed were the days of guilt and frustration — giving way to an obsession to recover that photo from my old phone. I scoured countless how‑to articles and YouTube videos titled “Try this if nothing else works” — But nothing worked.

I was shattered. I could’ve been surfing in the Bahamas instead of typing a status email to my manager — the one who began every sentence with, “Let’s not compare apples to oranges.”

Eventually, I surrendered to the truth: nothing in life arrives before its time… I stopped trying.

I stopped checking Bitcoin prices and started upvoting comments on Reddit that said “Bitcoin is a scam”.

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Fast forward to July 2025: Bitcoin soared to heights the world had never seen.

And then, something unexpected happened!

The kids were on summer break, and our dinner time had turned into a hub for a “family project” ideas. The winning idea was converting the storeroom into a cozy reading nook.

I honestly wasn’t thrilled to spend my time-off sorting through years of dust. But I didn’t have much of a say, so I chose to enjoy the process.

I started with an old box of toys.

Inside that box, I found my daughter’s old Polaroid camera. She used to love taking random pictures back then — everything from the dog’s nose to her half‑eaten breakfast.

Out of nostalgia — and partly to escape the cleaning — I began flipping through the stack of instant photos.

And there it was!

A blurry photo my daughter had taken years ago showed my coffee mug. Off to the side, on my desk, lay a sheet of paper with twelve handwritten words — the seed phrase I had written back then. The same one in the photo I had lost when I upgraded my phone. And, by pure luck, my daughter had unknowingly captured it in this random shot!

The words in this photo were out of focus, but I was already a seasoned pro at finding how‑to articles and YouTube tutorials to make them readable.

To my shock, Bitcoin’s price had climbed to unimaginable heights, surpassing $100,000 per coin!

And just like that, millions in Bitcoin returned to me — rescued not by a cutting-edge technology, but by a child’s random act of curiosity!

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