This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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...
Okay, but it's 500m though...
How much egg is gonna be on his face when he finds it one day behind a cabinet drawer?
Sometimes you can find scimitars in there. You can chop a camel right in its hump and drink all of its milk right off the tip of those things.
You throwing babies away?
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.
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.
Yeah wtf. Seeing Dubai as the ultimate utopia is so weird.
Or that dubai was built with such a paltry sum
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.
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.
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.
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.
The thing is, if he had access to his hard drive at any point in the last 10 years or so he would have sold his Bitcoin long before it was this valuable, like many, many other people who used to own Bitcoin and aren't currently millionaires. The fact that he lost his hard drive is the only reason it's actually worth anything.
That's a really good point. So many of my friends who used silk road would be multimillionaires if they didn't spend the btc.
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 had a hard drive with five Bitcoin. Gave the old Gateway PC to a felon buddy who was down bad and trying to rebuild his life learning some coding way back in the mid 2010’s.
He threw the computer away for a new one. At the time it was 10,000 bitcoin for a pizza so never cared. I chuckle about it now, but it’s gone forever.
🎵Money for nothing and checks for free🎶
bitcoin is just gambling and yall dropped your lotto ticket.
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?
This is the type of “buried treasure” story that kids have these days.
I just imagine a movie like The Goonies but instead of talking about a cave full their treasure, they tell stories about the “flash drive full of gold” that’s buried somewhere in the deepest reaches of the garbage dump.
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.
Even if Howells was able to somehow find the drive, it's been sitting in a landfill for more than a decade. Still, his team of experts believe there is about an 80 percent chance that data from the drive would be recoverable.
Is this copium?
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...
How would you make 500m if you'd already beaten the house once?
