Great comments from ETFbitcoin, and yes it's a line from Kubla Khan, and as I said; I was using it for practice purposes only; sending and receiving small amounts of bitcoin. I don't remember the exact steps for purchasing the coins; but roughly, back then; when you purchased the coins from bitcoin.org I think, you then had to transfer them from your purchase account to a wallet. I'm 99% sure that the wallet was electrum. When setting up the wallet it generated the seed automatically; but it offered you the option to enter your own 12 word seed and that I remember very clearly.
I used my favourite poem at the time and words from a favourite song (not shared that yet). For my main account I used default seed generated by Electrum.
It also said that you must never write the words anywhere in case someone discovered them and used them to still your coins. I wrote them down anyway and forgot about them for years until my interest was aroused by the sudden increase of Bitcoin value; then began the long search for the seed. I turned the house and garage over and under looking for them and eventually after years of searching I spotted them, scribbled so nonchalantly it's a wonder I ever found them. The excitement was electric. I could barely breathe when I typed them into electrum; but my heart sank as the BTC balance came up as zero.
Then began the search for proof of purchase. You see; if I could get the date of purchase and amount I paid I could at the very list go to blockchain explorer and locate my address and my coins because they would still be on the blockchain; with very few transactions clustered around the date of purchase. Needless to say, I was not able to find any proof; banks only keep records for 6 years so they could not help either. So I was back to square one. The only thing I have is a bunch of stupid meaningless words; but potentially worth a fortune. So I'm not ready to give up yet.
The latest breakthrough was finding those 12 words with the 10.7mBTC. That proved to me that the seed works under the correct circumstances.

1. Yes it's possible I downloaded a dodgy Electrum copy and someone stole all my coins. Then let's find the trail on the blockchain. I don't think this happened because nobody cared about Bitcoin to want to steal it back then.

2. Electrum wasn't available before 2011, nobody but spesmilo knows that for sure; his first commit on github is bumping up the version number.
from distutils.core import setup
version = "0.29"
version = "0.30"
So question, might be when did github to allow developers to push their code first come out. He might have been using SVN before that.
3. If not electrum then what other wallets were there, in shall we say 2011. Just bitcoin core and electrum right, I don't think there was anything else. I suspect I might have used a beta version; but honestly I don't really remember.
I know 100% that I bought the coins before or at the latest 2011; because I was working for this one company and I left that company in 2011 and I had already bought the coins by then.

I have now managed to check all my seeds against version 0.3 and most of the words are rejected. So now back to square one.
Maybe it was a different version of Electrum, maybe it was some other random wallet type whose name I can't remember. What a nightmare.

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