Man who threw away $500M Bitcoin hard drive sues city for right to search landfill
Man who threw away $500M Bitcoin hard drive sues city for right to search landfill
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.
Yes, he's stupid.
Or that dubai was built with such a paltry sum
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 in pieces.
I’m so glad I’ve spent my 2 or 3 bitcoins back in the early years for some 60€ software…
This feels similar to cyberpunk "I've been a corporation once, kids" stories, and something about gold rush.
Still better odds than winning the lottery!
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.
“This is our time! Down here, this is our time!”
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.
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.
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?
500 million justifies using some very fancy data recovery means, as long as he's sure it's the right drive.
Its not like i am naive to economy but i cant help but see this:
Ape spends time and energy to convinces other apes to spend time, energy and resources, potentially sacrifice some of the environment and cause hinder to the local population. To dig for a metallic object discarded a decade ago so they can with some hope extract a codestring of information which will unlock some other strings of 0 and 1 that we then collectively agree on means this person has x many digital object which we all agree on has x economic value.
And if they succeed they will al smile because this is winning.
Here is sm either more radical/normal, depending on your perspective. Take the drive that has the wallet/or make it a physical one. Place it in a museum and name it “x Bitcoins”. Value recovered and nothing was lost.
Humans are weird.
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.
You really don't want to set precedent here. What if any random person starts having hallucinations about hard drives being lost in the trash. You don't want anybody to have the right to dig up your landfill
I'm not seeing a negative here? As long as they accept liability why shouldn't someone be able to dig through landfill?
the potential liability exceeds the value of what they're searching for.
Air contamination, interruption of ongoing landfill operations, what if the landfills already capped? Do they get to reopen it? What contractors do you allow to do the work? Who takes the liability if they don't fulfill the work to the specification? What if multiple people want to dig in the landfill at the same time? Who arbitrates? What's the limit?
I mean, as long as they are willing to pay all the costs of digging up a landfill up front... Why not?
Sure, if he buys the landfill from the city. I Don't see a problem with that.
Anything short of that, disrupts current ongoing landfill operations.
You'll get payed when we find it!
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?
How much egg is gonna be on his face when he finds it one day behind a cabinet drawer?
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.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/iKcYS
The new El Dorado.
Still, I'm not sure why the council are addressing their statements to "Whales Online"
Maybe more like the new Oak Island Money Pit.
In a statement to Whales Online
Ooooowwwaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh
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?