I’ve heard about this dude since like…2018. At some point you have to move on. Shit like that will consume you, and it’s just not worth losing years of your life over it. Talk about a needle in a haystack.
It’s 500M though…
Well, it was. 11 years of landfill leachate have probably taken their toll, not to mention that it was probably crushed immediately under literal tons of soggy rainwater trash.
Life with friends and family is much more valuable than some extra 000s. Money can’t bring them back once they are gone. Nor can it be taken to the next life.
Okay, I see that. But it’s 500m tough…
Okay, there’s no chance he’s getting it back though…
This article looks like someone “wrote” it using speech-to-text and didn’t double-check their work.
tossing a hard driving
the whole thing could be for not (instead of “the whole thing could be for naught.”)
and of course,
In a statement to Whales Online
Of course, if it turns out that whales have banded together to make their own website, I’ll stand corrected.
Well this guy would have been a whale if he’d backed up his keys.
Pretty sure he would still be a man, no matter how many keys he made.
This article is about a marine mammal. For other uses, see Whale (disambiguation).
Omg good one
My favourite part from this story covered on another site was
Howells says that if only the council had entertained his excavation requests, “Newport would look like Dubai.” Currently, it still looks like Newport.
Does he really think $500M would significantly change a city? As if the city would get any part of it, or that Dubai is something to desire…
For all the talks about freedom and “decentralised” utopia the crypto bro cults spew all the time, they are really just obsessed with making absurd amounts of money fast. Their only motivation is greed.
Can’t say I’m surprised some regard Dubai as a goal. They only see the rich man’s club, they don’t care about how the sausage is made.
Yeah wtf. Seeing Dubai as the ultimate utopia is so weird.
Their only motivation is greed.
Gee, i’m so glad brick ‘n’ mortar banks are different… oh, wait…
Last time I checked, most individuals are not, in fact, banks.
Last time i checked banks and “regulating” bodies are run by, you guessed it, groups of individuals.
Which are not, by far, most people. I am not sure why you’re bringing the subject of banks. Of course they’re shitty and mostly run by bastards. Okay.
But cryptomoney people are not banks, or groups of individuals. They’re individuals. And they’re in it because of the “get rich quick” scheme and push others to get into the pyramid’s lower levels, because that’s how they might get richer. So they’re either bastards or being conned, or probably both.
Proof of work is a power/hardware catastrophe, and proof of stake is entrusting power to the already rich again. Crypto is not a new economy model, it’s a bad subset of the old one with fancy fake ideals.
Most cryptocrrencies do seem scammy, i’ll give you that,
Or that dubai was built with such a paltry sum
Yes, he’s stupid.
Most likely he won’t find that treasure. Instead of wasting years of his life, and not the worst of them, he could be spending time with girls or working his ass off for some more certain value to spend as he sees fit.
How much egg is gonna be on his face when he finds it one day behind a cabinet drawer?
I remember hearing about this guy years ago. He probably is now devoting 10 (?) years of his life (I did not look it up) searching for his lost bitcoin, but I have got the feeling, that he will never find them.
Still better odds than winning the lottery!
But boy, if he does…
This is such a monkeys paw. You have a drive with $500 million USD of Bitcoin, but the drive is somewhere in the local landfill.
Such a curse, I can’t imagine the regret they feel every day getting up for work.
After 10 years though, isn’t it just gone/destroyed? Rain/corrosion would have destroyed the drive by now.
If he had kept his seed phrase for his wallet, he would be able to recover the funds to a new hard drive. This was very common advice if you did a little bit of research before purchasing btc. I can’t judge too much though as I ignored a dogecoin wallet when they were worthless but 500,000 doge suddenly felt less worthless once doge pushed past 5-10 cents, but by that time, my wallet was gone and I had lost my seed.
I have a friend in NY who lost a thumb drive with bitcoin on it in 2011. Every year or two he goes a little nuts and searches his entire apartment for it, but obviously has never found it. I think he threw it away and doesn’t remember, but the exercise of searching helps him exorcise the demons.
I put about 10% of my investment portfolio in bitcoin, personally. It’s way too volatile, at least for me, to go in big, but I can trust that every 3-4 years people are going to go insane buying it and the price will spike. If you’re already invested you can benefit.
I had a fraction of Bitcoin mined, not bought, in early years when you could do that on a desktop PC. It was so unimportant for me, that this is the first time I’ve remembered about this. I suppose it costs now enough to care, but I still don’t.
While
he goes a little nuts and searches his entire apartment for it, but obviously has never found it
happens to me with searching for childhood’s toys, old drawings, attempts at poetry. But not this.
It’s already corroded from the factory…hard drive platters use iron oxide. Can’t rust rust. The mechanical bits may be trashed but the platter can most likely still be read with specialized recovery equipment.
Who could you even trust to send the drive to? Anyone who could read it could take the money and just claim it couldn’t be recovered.
Data recovery specialists exist, and nobody would pay for them if the data they were recovering wasn’t, you know, valuable enough to pay a specialist to maybe retrieve it. They probably deal with multimillion dollar industrial/financial/business secrets all the time, and do it discreetly, or else their business wouldn’t even exist.
It would be so fucking funny if these bitcoins never existed and this is all one big ruse to trick crypto investors into excavating a landfill.
All this time he could’ve thought up another magnificent way to make money but he chose to stay in the past, longing for something probably already completely degraded, destroyed or recycled, even if it’s 500M…
What does “let him try and find the hard drive” really mean? Does he just want access to the landfill or is he expecting some kind of cooperation with the workers? How disruptive is he going to be?
Very disruptive. Landfills typically bury the day’s trash at the end of the day and it’s just layers and layers of garbage, like lasagna. You might be able to work on Monday’s trash slice, but by the time Thursday rolls around, it’s time to add a layer on top of Monday.
Digging could interrupt the entire landfill process if it’s still an active landfill, meaning the daily garbage has to be redirected elsewhere, because landfills aren’t just a hole in the ground, they are a feat of engineering.
I’m a simple man. I see Practical Engineering, I up vote.
He can’t get the money to find it so he is suing the city to take the risk.
If he prepaid the $50 million to excavate, sort, and rebuild the landfill, there would be no problem.
🎵Money for nothing and checks for free🎶
bitcoin is just gambling and yall dropped your lotto ticket.
Chicks, not checks, btw.
For $5M you can have all the chicks that you want… I joke that my wife keeps me in check and I keep her in cash.
Two checks at the same time, man.
Drives probably rusted away to nothing by now, even if he miraculously could find it the odds of getting anything from it are probably less than him winning the lottery.
Technicians can work wonders as long as the seals to the spinny bits are intact. It would be cool to see even if it’s just bitcoin
And if he does find it, 500m will pay for a lot of technicians
Technicians that will probably demand a commission not a flat rate. Might be wrong on that because I doubt he’ll find it.
Landfills are huge and a metal detector would be completely useless in this scenario. He has absolutely no idea where on the landfill it would be how deep down it would be or even if it’s definitely in there. Don’t a lot of places like this pull out anything that might be useful and sell them?
not to mention but he might not even have ever had the bitcoin to begin with and is just doing a fishing expedition for dump hard drives in hopes one does have bitcoin on it
It depends on the sorting process. I don’t know much about his situation. If the hard drive got thrown into the trash, then it is most likely in a plastic bag somewhere buried. However, if it went through some kind of electronic recycling program then it was probably stripped for metals and parts.
IMO, if the dude wants to walk around the dump for the rest of his life trying to find his $500 million treasure chest then let him. The only problem with that is, how many other people are going to want to find things in the dump? Are we just going to allow people to wander through the dump now?? Perhaps instead of suing, he should just find someone willing to front the money to buy the entire dump. Haha.
It’s not a dump but a landfill. There’s a liner to keep toxic trash from leaking into ground water. There are venting tubes for methane. There are alternating layers of trash and compacted soil to keep it stable.
https://indd.adobe.com/view/3a6b3f8c-bcd0-4917-9a48-5bf861a5afc6
There is some method to the madness of dumping, trucks are not allowed to drive around and find a spot. Trash deposits get cycled to keep the dump somewhat level. It’s a “fill up Sect 12A, then fill up 78C” type of deal.
It’s not parceled like land, no where close to being exact. If the paper records go back that far and are intact, it would be a “Check out Sect 91B…maybe 10 to 100 feet down. Good luck”
