A $100 Bitcoin Receipt Survived Seven Winters in My Jacket Pocket

One paper receipt, folded eight times, gone soft at every crease. Coinsource ATM inside the Shell station on Route 9 in Hadley, Massachusetts, December 14, 2018, 9:40 at night. The machine sat between an ice cooler and a bait fridge, and it printed this thing on thermal paper that has since faded to a pale gray ghost of the original black. Buy: 0.0274 bitcoin. Fee: $12.40. Total: $112.40.

I was twenty-nine, and my checking account held $2,318 that Friday, with $1,450 rent due on the first and a roommate named Doug who owned exactly one burned pan. A hundred dollars was real money. I made the decision anyways, standing next to the windshield washer fluid, feeding twenties into a machine that charged a 12.4 percent fee for the privilege.

The part I still cannot explain cleanly: I did not lose that money. I did not sell it, spend it, or send it anywhere. It sat in an app called BRD on an iPhone 7 while I got promoted, moved twice, and got married, and the only reason I ever confirmed it survived is a jacket I stopped wearing in 2019. The closet comes later.

the machine ate twenty minutes

The ATM walked me through a phone number, a texted code, and four separate scans of my driver's license against a glass strip that kept rejecting the glare from the fluorescent tube above it. A man buying cigarettes queued behind me the entire time and said nothin', which was louder than any complaint I have ever heard in my life. Twenty minutes for $100 of bitcoin. The receipt clocked me in at 9:18 and out at 9:40.

0.0274 of anything

BRD was a blue icon with a white paper plane, and I copied the receive address character by character cuz the ATM's camera refused my QR code eleven separate times. That deposit lives on the blockchain in a block mined that same night, permanent, public, and reviewed by nobody, which I did not think about then and think about weekly now. Eleven scans. One deposit. Done.

the bottom came one day later

Bitcoin bottomed at $3,191 on December 15, 2018, twenty-one hours after my receipt printed, which means I bought my fees and my impatience within a day of the exact floor of the worst market of my lifetime. My effective basis, fee included, worked out to $4,102 per coin. Down 22 percent by breakfast. I checked the price twice that weekend, felt a hot feeling behind my ears, closed the app, and decided the app did not exist. Looking felt worse than not knowing.

a Rubbermaid bin in Worcester

The Columbia jacket moved with me to Worcester in 2019 and into a Rubbermaid bin, because I bought a car that year and a man with heated seats does not need a parka. It sat through two leases, one damp basement, and my wife's long campaign to donate anything without a pulse. Every winter it hung in a closet, unworn and unconsidered. The receipt stayed folded in the left pocket through all seven winters, from the one that began two weeks after I bought it to the one that ended in March 2025. Seven winters. Zero checks.

March 2025, the Saturday deadline

My wife issued one Saturday in March 2025 to empty the spare closet, and I was three Rubbermaid bins deep when my hand found a crumpled mass in the left pocket of that jacket. I sat with it on the closet floor for a full minute before I unfolded it twice to read it. Coinsource. 0.0274. December 14, 2018. My first figured was that thermal paper is a slight miracle of cheap engineering. My second figured was a number I had to go find.

finding the coins in 2025

BRD died as an app in 2021, acquired and sunset by Coinbase, so recovery meant finding the twelve words I had written on a torn page of a Moleskine in 2018. The page sat in a fire safe my father-in-law handed us in 2020, in my own handwriting, every word spelled correctly, which surprised me given the handwriting. I figured out the restore into a Trezor Model One through Electrum that same Saturday night, forty minutes end to end including the two times I retyped everything from scratch. The Electrum balance line loaded before the history did. 0.0274 bitcoin. $2,603.

the arithmetic of a gas station premium

The arithmetic deserves its own paragraph. Coinbase would have charged me a $1.49 ACH fee and approximately a half percent spread for the same $100 order, call it $2 all in. Coinsource took $12.40 up front plus a spread baked into the rate, so my premium for standing at a gas station instead of my couch was about $10.91, or one large pie with two toppings at Steve's Alpine Pizzeria in 2018 dollars. The fee was eleven times the polite option. Seven years later the position sits up 23 times from the $112.40 all-in, and I have sold none of it, cuz a man who feeds a machine next to a bait fridge does not get to lecture anybody about timing.

back on the hook in the front hall

The jacket went back on its hook in the front hall of a house I could not have rented in 2018, because some winters around here still need a parka. The receipt went back in the left pocket, still folded eight times, still fading toward nothing. I bought a $14 document bag for the Trezor card and the Moleskine page and stopped there. Paper receipt, paper seed, two pockets between them. That is it. That is the whole position.