I've wondered for some time now... isn't this access issue a huge weakenss of crypto currency? Forgotten or 'lost' fiat money will turn up at some point but more keys to bitcoin and the like will get lost over time, reducing the overall amount.
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Remember the Bitcoin landfill guy?
- Thread starter Wrexis
- Start date
I have no clue how any of that stuff works rofl... But reading a small article it looks like he's only offered the city 25% of the coins on this HDD? What's stopping the city from telling the dude to sod off and they take over the recovery of this drive for 100% of it. Since it was originally thrown out no court will judge that he's still the legal owner of the drive imo...
When it comes to crypto, it's pretty far down on the list of many many many issues crypto has.
It's the environmental impact. The landfill has been covered with dirt and grass. Digging up and sifting through the trash would kick up all sorts of hazardous stuff into the surrounding area.
If someone did and knew what they had, they'd have blackmailed him with it. The hard drive is surely protected in such a way that someone else would be unable to access the contents. (Yes, I am giving the guy who through it away in the first place too much credit there)
I'm pretty sure some data would still be recoverable, he probably only needs a few sectors to be good. It would be extra funny if he actually found the drive but could only recover parts of his pron folder but the key had been permanently damaged.
tbh I think I would have rather sold the bitcoins. At least then you have closure. This dude has been searching for his missing millions for nearly a decade already and I don't think he's ever going to recover his wallet. It's just going to keep eating away at him forever.
I don't know why I picture him explaining a new scheme like this every time he has a new proposal on how to find the hard drive.
Yeah I actually feel kinda bad for this guy. I've been eaten up by losing small things, can't imagine what losing hundreds of millions would feel like. I'd probably be doing similar things to find it.
Also, they probably don't trust the guy to do things properly. When your recovery plan includes Boston Dyamics robots (because they're so cool) you don't inspire much confidence.
That's by design. At some point in the future, roughly 2140, the last of the 21 million bitcoins will be mined. At this point the deflationary pressure on its supply will come solely from people losing access to their coins, rather than the halving cycle every 4 years. If you don't have the keys, the bitcoin is lost essentially forever. That's important to its security. It's key to the whole innovation, really.
LOL I thought i was weird like that, I was even thinking of buying something to see if they were still had anything on them.
It's a "feature". Lost Bitcoin is Bitcoin that can't be sold, thus driving down supply which in turn drives up prices. Forced hodling.
So how many harddrives are in a given landfill? Does he know exactly what it looks like? And what kind of forgotten crimes will be uncovered by restoring every harddrive they come across?
They're gonna find like eight bodies and seventy two murder weapons but zero hard drives and consider it a failure.
Actually remember reading a New Yorker article about the guy like a year ago, the story had a few more details, in particular how he/why he lost the hard drive.
Half a Billion in Bitcoin, Lost in the Dump
For years, a Welshman who threw away the key to his cybercurrency stash has been fighting to excavate the local landfill.
Howells and his partner, Hafina, were raising three children, and family trips—like the one that they had taken to Disneyland Paris—were fun but exhausting. So he had made plans to treat himself to what he called a "lads' vacation": a trip with friends to a resort in Cyprus. Howells, an engineer who helped maintain emergency-response systems for various communities in Wales, often worked from home, and that night he decided to neaten up his office. As he recently recalled to me, "The thought process was: I'm going to be drinking every day. I don't want to be on a hangover and cleaning this mess up when I get back."
At around 10:30 p.m., Hafina peeked into Howells's office. "She wanted to have a fag with me," he remembers. "The office area, with the window open, was the smoking zone." She chatted with Howells as he chose which items to discard. "I'm chucking this out, putting this back in—bunch of cables, bunch of paperwork, broken mouse."
In a cluttered desk drawer, he found two small hard drives. One, he knew, was blank. The other held files from an old Dell gaming laptop, including e-mails, music that he'd downloaded, and duplicates of family photographs. He'd removed the drive a few years earlier, after he'd spilled lemonade on the computer's keyboard. Howells grabbed the unwanted hard drive and threw it into a black garbage bag.
Later, when the couple slid into bed, Howells asked Hafina, who dropped off their kids at day care each morning, if she would mind taking the trash to the dump also. He remembers her declining, saying, "It's not my fucking job—it's your job." Howells conceded the point. As his head hit the pillow, he recalls, he made a mental note to remove the hard drive from the bag. "I'm a systems engineer," he said. "I've never thrown a hard drive in the bin. It's just a bad idea."
The next day, Hafina got up early and took the garbage to the landfill after all. Howells remembers waking upon her return, at around nine. "Ah, did you take the bag to the tip?" he asked. He told himself, "Oh, fuck—she's chucked it," but he was still groggy, and he soon fell back asleep.
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Half a year later, the spilled lemonade destroyed his gaming laptop. He transferred some of the hard drive's contents to a new iMac, but he did not bother with the bitcoin folder. "There was no Bitcoin version on Apple at the time, so there was no reason," he recalls. He then extracted the hard drive and put it in the desk drawer.
According to the BBC article, the Oslo man had bought the apartment partly by selling a thousand bitcoins, which were then worth about a hundred and seventy thousand dollars. By the time Howells ended his mining project, he had accumulated eight thousand coins—and in the fall of 2013 that stash was worth about $1.4 million. Howells's salary at his engineering job was a small fraction of that, and he sometimes had to get up at 3 a.m. and travel long distances to make repairs to a town's emergency-response system. Panicked, he checked his desk drawer. In it, he found the empty hard drive—not the one with the bitcoin folder.
--
When Howells had his uh-oh moment, his hard drive was already buried under other people's trash. He wanted to go to the dump, but he was embarrassed—and afraid that nobody would believe his story. "Explaining Bitcoin at the time was not easy," he recalls. So for about a month he told no one, and watched helplessly as the bitcoin market soared, and with it the value of his lost holdings. He remembers saying to himself, "Oh, shit—this is turning into a bigger and bigger mistake." Around the time that his bitcoin became worth six million dollars, he confessed to Hafina. She was shocked to learn of the potential windfall, and encouraged him to go to the dump to see if anything could be done. When he told the manager there that he'd accidentally thrown away about four million pounds, he got a lot of head shakes, but eventually the manager took him to an elevated spot to survey the site: the mounds of churned earth, the depot where trash was mixed with soil, the grassed-over areas of retired landfill. Howells's heart sank: he saw ten to fifteen soccer pitches' worth of garbage. How could he possibly sift through it all?
It was actually a really interesting article, and went into alot of detail about the whole situation. He made a some huge mistakes, but godamn if I wouldnt be tortured every night laying in bed thinking of how my life could be completely different. Guy comes across as kinda weird and kinda crazy, but the way his life has gone with his wife and kids leaving him, what a rough turn of events.
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9 years in a landfill with garbage juice and rain water getting to it, it's fucking gone man, even if you found it I don't think you could restore anything on it.
I hope whoever finds the drive destroy it, or that the drive is irreversibly damaged beyond recovery.
I bet over the year he's gonna become the modern equivalent of the crazy old goldminer, long white beard, torn & tattered clothes, constantly muttering to himself: "I'm so close, I can almost smell the harddrive, eeh-hee-hee-heeh!" while shoveling through the trash, daily, from sunrise to sundown. And when he goes to town once a week to get his vittles, the kids will run & yell: " Crazy Ol' Jim's comin'!"
Everyone saying you could recover the data… nah. This isn't like trying to get info from deleted texts or something, where you can recover even a percentage of the data and pull useful information. If any part of the relevant code is on a part of the drive that is damaged physically, it's gonna render the entire thing useless.
How does he have funding from two people?? There's no longterm business plan, it's just him wanting his money back, and in the end, when he doesn't find it or can't get the money from the drive, they've lost 11 million dollars.
Dude needs to move on. I get it awful losing so much money, but it isn't coming back.
But also, seeing crypto bullshit go bad makes me happy 🤷♂️👀
Dude needs to move on. I get it awful losing so much money, but it isn't coming back.
But also, seeing crypto bullshit go bad makes me happy 🤷♂️👀
