“Buddy is the best dog in the world.”

The coins

In the early Bitcoin crowd, Alexandra went by icicle. In May and June 2011 she sent £500 to Britcoin, the exchange that later became Intersango, and bought 51 BTC plus part of another. She posted the payment reference and her user ID publicly at the time, so there’s a record of the purchase from when it actually happened.

Those coins sat in her Intersango account for two years. Then Buddy showed up and gave them a job.

Locked out, the first time

Early in 2013 Alexandra lost access to her Intersango account. She opened a support ticket and spent weeks chasing it, and by March the fight had spilled onto Bitcointalk. She got back in eventually.

“It took me three months to get back in.”

Alexandra

Read the 2013 Bitcointalk thread

She sees Buddy

Buddy wasn’t a shelter dog. A woman named Christy found him wandering beside a highway in rural Georgia and took him in. Nobody knew exactly how old he was, and nobody seemed to be looking for him. Alexandra’s elderly dog had died the day before she saw his photo online. She knew almost nothing about him, but she knew she wanted him.

Over the next few days she found out how sick he was. Buddy had severe congenital subaortic stenosis, a narrowing just below the valve where blood leaves the heart, so his heart had to work far harder than it should. There was an operation for it. Alexandra found it almost straight away, read the published research, and emailed the University of Florida nine days after first seeing his picture. He wasn’t even hers yet.

“if the stenosis progresses, will he still be able to have the operation or will he be too old by then?”

Alexandra, to the University of Florida, June 18, 2013

The adoption nearly fell through when someone else was given priority. On June 16 Alexandra wrote that she was “beyond heartbroken thinking about what will happen to him now.” The next day it turned around: “It looks like I might be getting Buddy after all!” She picked Buddy up on June 22, 2013.

“We could have had a fit dog. We chose that one because I knew there was a new operation that could fix him, and I knew no-one else was going to rescue him and spend all that money, and I knew that I had a small fortune in bitcoins I could use to do it.”

Alexandra, Bitcointalk, October 2013

Those old bitcoins had a purpose now. Buddy.

The money was right there, and locked

One weekend in October, one of Alexandra’s kids found Buddy collapsed and unresponsive in the back garden. Alexandra brought him round herself and got him to the vet. What the vet told her was terrifying: if Buddy was going to have the operation, it had to happen within days. She had the money. It was sitting in her Intersango account.

On October 22, 2013, with the clock running, she got locked out again. This time it was never fixed. The next morning she posted that the site still recognised her email address and user ID, but not her password, and every reset failed.

“A dog with a severe subaortic stenosis needs an operation.”

Alexandra, Bitcointalk, October 23, 2013

Three days later she wrote to Christy: “I have some bad news about Buddy’s operation. I have lost access to the money necessary to fund it... I’ll get it back, it is just a question of how big a stink I need to raise and exactly where.” She sent in her passport for verification, appealed publicly and filed a police report. None of it worked. The coins have never been returned.

By the end of October, Buddy’s name was part of the Bitcoin conversation. Those coins weren’t just a balance anymore. There was a woman who had promised to save a dog, kids waiting for him to get better, and Buddy, who had no idea what an exchange even was.

Keeping him alive long enough

Surgery would fix Buddy. The hard part was keeping him well enough to get there. Alexandra worked through the medical literature and built a regimen around what she was learning. She kept notes, logged his heart rate against food and exercise, and tracked every change she made. The goal was simple: keep his heart steady until he could have the operation.

“I had kept him alive by doing PhD level research — every paper possibly relevant, every signaling cascade we knew about explored.”

Alexandra, in an email to the Buddy team

“I moved heaven and earth to save that dog. Three times. It’s quite a story.”

Alexandra, in a message to the Buddy team

Dogecoin launches

Most people think dogs in crypto started with Doge. By the day Dogecoin launched, Buddy was already tied to Bitcoin in public, in Alexandra’s own posts about the operation he needed and the coins she couldn’t reach. Buddy was there first.

The thirty minute scan that took ninety

By August 2014 a new scan was good enough to reopen the question of surgery, and Alexandra sent it to Florida. They travelled down for the assessment. The cardiologist said the scan would take about thirty minutes. It took ninety. At first it looked like they might be too late. Then Alexandra looked at the figures and pointed out that Buddy’s heart was still pumping a completely normal amount of blood.

“the vet was about to recommend not having the op thinking it was too late to save him, then saw the sheer amount of blood it was pumping.”

Alexandra, September 30, 2014

They looked again, and Buddy was still a candidate. A year of research hadn’t cleared the blockage, but it had done something just as important. It had kept Buddy in good enough shape that the operation was still possible.

Buddy gets his operation

They drove to Florida, stopping early that morning at Christy’s house so she could see Buddy before he went in. The next day Alexandra got to write the message she’d spent more than a year fighting for.

“Buddy had his op. He is doing well... he came through safely.”

Alexandra, November 12, 2014

Buddy came home on November 14. Eight months later his heart was stable and he was doing fine. The bitcoins never came back. Buddy got his operation anyway.

A stranger steps in

Not long after Buddy got home, an anonymous Bitcoiner who had been reading Alexandra’s posts got in touch and offered to help. She didn’t think the offer was serious and politely turned it down. The stranger insisted. Then the help actually arrived: the donor’s own money, put toward what Buddy’s care had cost. All they asked was that she pay it forward. She never forgot it.

So one person in that early crowd wrote Buddy’s name into the blockchain for good, and someone else followed his story closely enough to show up with real help.

Finding icicle

Years later the inscription got dug back up. People went through old Bitcointalk posts and wallet histories trying to work out who Buddy had actually been, and the trail kept leading back to one username: icicle.

Alexandra answered. She didn’t just confirm the story and disappear. She went looking for old photos, and when Gmail wouldn’t cooperate, she found an old Twitter account and posted the pictures straight into an X thread.

After weeks of usernames, dates and transaction hashes, Buddy finally had a face.

“I’m happy to answer anything about Buddy.”

Alexandra

You can find her on X at @1c1cl3.