Hard Drive With 7,500 Bitcoin Buried in Landfill. Can It Be Dug Up? (newyorker.com) 198
In 2013 a British man accidentally threw away a hard drive that contained 7,500 bitcoin. Today it'd be worth over $350 million, reports CNBC:
His name is James Howells. He's an IT worker from Wales... He once told NBC News, "It is soul-destroying, to be honest... Every second of the day I am thinking about what could've been." In a last-ditch effort earlier this year, Howells offered his local town tens of millions of dollars to help him find it.
By "find it," he means "digging through his local dump" (where the hard drive ended up). The New Yorker reported that this spring Howell finally got a meeting with two city officials, one of whom was responsible for the city's waste and sanitation services. But after he'd delivered his home-made PowerPoint presentation over Zoom, he says their response was, "You know, Mr. Howells, there is absolutely zero appetite for this project to go ahead within Newport City Council." When the meeting ended, she said that she would call him if the situation changed. Months of silence followed. (A spokesperson for the city council told me that the official permit for the site does not allow "excavation work....")
"The total area we want to dig is two hundred and fifty metres by two hundred and fifty metres by fifteen metres deep," Howells told me, with excitement. "It's forty thousand tons of waste. It's not impossible, is it?"
The New Yorker also reports that in mid-November Howells got a second response from the local city officials — declining to authorize his landfill digging yet again, calling it "environmentally risky."
The incident raises the question as to whether there should be a better way to recover lost cryptocoins — but Howells himself remains opposed to that. So meanwhile Howells keeps checking a phone app telling him how much his bitcoin would be worth if he hadn't thrown away the hard drive.
One day, he watched its value swing by $20 million.
By "find it," he means "digging through his local dump" (where the hard drive ended up). The New Yorker reported that this spring Howell finally got a meeting with two city officials, one of whom was responsible for the city's waste and sanitation services. But after he'd delivered his home-made PowerPoint presentation over Zoom, he says their response was, "You know, Mr. Howells, there is absolutely zero appetite for this project to go ahead within Newport City Council." When the meeting ended, she said that she would call him if the situation changed. Months of silence followed. (A spokesperson for the city council told me that the official permit for the site does not allow "excavation work....")
"The total area we want to dig is two hundred and fifty metres by two hundred and fifty metres by fifteen metres deep," Howells told me, with excitement. "It's forty thousand tons of waste. It's not impossible, is it?"
The New Yorker also reports that in mid-November Howells got a second response from the local city officials — declining to authorize his landfill digging yet again, calling it "environmentally risky."
The incident raises the question as to whether there should be a better way to recover lost cryptocoins — but Howells himself remains opposed to that. So meanwhile Howells keeps checking a phone app telling him how much his bitcoin would be worth if he hadn't thrown away the hard drive.
One day, he watched its value swing by $20 million.
Here's my proposal (Score:5, Insightful)
If he wants to dig that area up he should be responsible for making it benefit others. That is, he's got to separate any recyclables out of the volume excavated, and wash them. He's got to separate any green waste out, and compost it. He's got to remove any recyclable or mercury-containing batteries and dispose of them properly. Etc etc. And the whole project has to be carried out under appropriate HAZMAT conditions with proper PPE. Anything less is a) of zero value to the community and b) potentially incurs costs.
Re:Here's my proposal (Score:5, Informative)
If he wants to dig that area up he should be responsible for making it benefit others.
There's a decent chance that the hard disk has broken open when the rubbish was crushed and that the data has been destroyed together with the platters. In which case there's no way that this guy has the money to cover what you propose. Even if he, or some company working with him, promises that they'll just go bankrupt and leave the local people with the problem.
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There's a decent chance that the hard disk has broken open when the rubbish was crushed and that the data has been destroyed together with the platters. In which case there's no way that this guy has the money to cover what you propose.
Absolutely correct. So unless he can get someone to invest in his scheme, the whole thing should be a non-starter. The current (unknown) state of the HDD is irrelevant to how the city, county or whatever should behave. (Too lazy to read TFS again, let alone TFA.) No cash up front for operating expenses? No operation.
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In Wales, the tiers of government are
Local Authority - which does both city and county stuff.
Some parts of Wales also have a Community Council or Town Council which looks after things like parks and village halls. Unlike incorporated areas in the US, they tend to be smaller villages rather than the big cities.
The Welsh Government - which is a bit like a state government
And the British Government
It is the local authority of which there are 22 in Wales that deals with waste collection.
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There's a decent chance that the hard disk has broken open when the rubbish was crushed and that the data has been destroyed together with the platters. In which case there's no way that this guy has the money to cover what you propose.
Absolutely correct. So unless he can get someone to invest in his scheme, the whole thing should be a non-starter. The current (unknown) state of the HDD is irrelevant to how the city, county or whatever should behave. (Too lazy to read TFS again, let alone TFA.) No cash up front for operating expenses? No operation.
This all sounds like a setup story for a reality show like "The Curse of Oak Island". Maybe the History channel or TLC will fund it.
Re:Here's my proposal (Score:5, Interesting)
Decent chance the drive is damaged beyond repair? I would say it is almost guaranteed. After being under 15m of landfill debris for a few years, any mechanical damage is sure to be complimented with chemical damage, making data recovery almost impossible.
He would have better odds playing the lottery.
Re: Here's my proposal (Score:2)
I'd agree. A landfill isn't like your garden compost. It's garbage covered with packed dirt to seal in the waste. Machines have driven over it.
You'd have a better chance trying to figure out how to re-mine the bitcoins, but if you do then it will break the bitcoin currency.
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And before that, when it goes in the bin lorry (garbage truck), it gets compacted right after the bin bags are thrown into the lorry or the wheelie bin is tipped into it.
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The waste is usually compacted before being dumped, so there is a good chance that the drive was destroyed before it even ended up in the ground.
If it survived, most drives from that era had a small hole with a filter that allowed pressure to equalize, so when exposed to liquid there is a way in. It will certainly have been rained on.
There is a remote possibility that the platter with his crypto wallet on it is still intact and partly readable. A data recovery company can remove it, place it in another driv
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After being under 15m of landfill debris for a few years...
Can I use this for the What Do You Remember About Windows ME? [slashdot.org] thread? :-)
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Even if he, or some company working with him, promises that they'll just go bankrupt and leave the local people with the problem.
In that case, he should purchase an insurance policy for whatever damage might be cause. That way, local people will not be "left with" a problem, rather money will be available to fix the problem.
If he can't pay for an insurance policy, not even on a contingency basis (by granting the insurance company a share of whatever bitcoins are found), then that should be the end of the story - the market has determined that his hard drive is not worth digging for.
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Even with the platters being broken into large pieces , it still might be recoverable. But it can be expensive. However, its possible to read the data off even a broken platter, using an external reader setup. Its mainly a matter of money. Given enough money, its possible. The thing that would make it unrecoverable is rust or being ground to powder.
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Honestly I suspect if he offered to split the proceeds 50/50 rather than offering 5/95 (20mil is about 6% of 350, give or take) , he might actually find a town council rather eager to get its mits on it.
And he'd still be walking away with $175mil, which is enough money to retire *very* comfortably indeed.
Re: Here's my proposal (Score:3)
I've seen worse crowdfunding proposals. If the town agrees that he could remove the landfill, under stipulated conditions, and he can fund it up front through crowdfunding, and he can prove to a lawyer he has the keys, then it's not even a bad proposal. It's unlikely to succeed but people play the lottery every day with much less chance of success.
Re: Here's my proposal (Score:2)
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If he wants to dig that area up he should be responsible for making it benefit others. That is, he's got to separate any recyclables out of the volume excavated, and wash them.
That's not the issue. Leaving the recylables where they are and not disturbing the dump is the best possible environmental outcome. A landfill is literally a giant decaying methane bubble and quite dangerous to dig into even when you ignore all the shit people themselves actually throw in there.
People think you can just go in there with a backhoe and get busy, that would be a disaster.
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No FDIC insurance? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, that's what you get when you don't have anything backing up your deposits. I can't figure out why anyone with a bunch of bitcoins is throwing away hard drives anyway. Really though, is this just stupid or what? How much electricity got wasted in this little debacle?
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Not just keys, the "actual" bitcoin (the encrypted data) was stored on the disk. He was storing them himself. He could have all the keys but if he threw away the files with the disk then the keys are meaningless. You actually need to back up your bitcoin themselves, not just the keys! The corollary to that is that you can't just accept bitcoin as files and sit on them, because someone could have a backup and they could transfer those bitcoin to someone else, so you have to transfer them when you get them, a
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Re: No FDIC insurance? (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you even crypto?
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Not just keys, the "actual" bitcoin (the encrypted data) was stored on the disk.
No. Bitcoin (and its limitless spin-offs) is/are based on public key cryptography, and the actual coins are stored on the blockchain (which is redundantly stored through multiple nodes throughout the network, so there's no need to have your own copy). Your public key is your wallet address on the blockchain, and its associated private key enables you to instruct the network to send cryptocurrency from that wallet to a different wallet.
Usually when people lose their cryptocurrency, it's because they had it
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I can't figure out why anyone with a bunch of bitcoins is throwing away hard drives anyway. Really though, is this just stupid or what? How much electricity got wasted in this little debacle?
Undoubtedly the coins were mined back in the days when all it took was running a program on your PC - which means that the drive is by now deeply buried in the landfill.
A better idea is to search old hard drives before they get thrown out.
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I just back up old hard drives, then destroy them and throw them out... The capacity of these old drives is so low that it takes very little effort to archive them onto a modern NAS.
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when you don't have anything backing up your deposits
In this case, when we say backup, we literally mean backup. Bitcoin is simply binary data. One can make as many copies of it and your keys as one wants (it's the blockchain protocol that makes only the first one spendable and therefore non counterfeitable).
Didn't back up your data? Boo-fucking-hoo.
Endlessly (Score:2)
If things go on like they have this may turn out to be an endlessly recyclable story.
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A new kind of Bitcoin mining (Score:5, Funny)
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no (Score:3)
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That's possible, but it's also entirely possible that the disk pack is unharmed. It really depends on what was around it at the time of compaction. If it was next to other hard stuff, that's quite possibly true. If it was surrounded by softer refuse, then it could conceivably remain intact. There's no way to know without finding it.
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That's true, although some of the conner drives were back in the early 3.5" half height ATA days. But one could get lucky. I doubt it, and I wouldn't spend my money on it, but then I didn't throw away a fortune either.
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See, this is why you need reliable offsit backups. (Score:2)
When preaching this message, I have talked about people who have lost months of work. Or hundreds of customers.
Now I have a new morality lesson.
How to get the council on your side (Score:3)
wow (Score:2)
"It is soul-destroying, to be honest... Every second of the day I am thinking about what could've been."
"Doctor, it hurts when I do this."
"Well, then don't do that."
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Could be an idea here. (Score:3)
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If you could mine a landfill for less than the cost of raw resource mining, and with the same or less ecological impact, I think we'd already be doing it. We probably will one day... we certainly SHOULD, unless we all want to be living surrounded by toxic middens one day.
Then again, people. We'll probably cure cancer and invent reliable treatments for heavy metal poisoning rather than clean up the carcinogens and sludge we've dumped into our environment.
Art meets reality (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, can the tech industry prove it's absurdity any more by actually mimicking stories from Silicon Valley?
As an aside, Russ Hanneman has his own LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/russ-hanneman-78831a113/
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You've got the chronology wrong. Silicon Valley premiered in 2014; the first BBC story that I can find about this guy's hard drive [bbc.com] is from 2013.
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I think SV was made after this happened, and it was publicised way back not long after it happened. I think they lifted the idea from this guy.
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Isn't this the long term horizon of all Bitcoin? (Score:2)
There's a fixed number of Bitcoin, right, something like 21 million? Given that, won't all Bitcoin eventually get lost via routes like this? As the number of available bitcoins dwindles, I guess the remaining ones become more valuable, but it seems to me that the inability to recover lost Bitcoin is a fundamental problem. What am I missing?
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Bitcoin can't be used just as a currency for any number of reasons (well, all the most important ones one can think of, like fees, latency, barely a few transactions per second in the whole network, etc.). Lost bitcoins will make it behave more like what it seems to be now, a pyramid scheme (the remaining ones will increase in price as you mentioned) but won't put much of a problem for transactions (more than they're a problem already), you can transfer fractional bitcoins (satoshi - a one hundred millionth
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Yea, right, imagine one day you pay 10000 BTC for two pizzas and one day your YEARLY salary is 1 (one) BTC and change.
Re: Isn't this the long term horizon of all Bitcoi (Score:2)
There are countries and situations in which 20% swings in value are better than what the local currency has to offer. Zimbabwe, Venezuela, are examples. So there is certainly a use case for the currency in those situations.
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You think it's 20% between 10000 BTC for a pizza (or two?) and 1.x BTC yearly salary?
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"It's better than Venezuela and Zimbabwe" doesn't seem like a great argument in favour of bitcoin.
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Yes, and I moved back to the US only after I persuaded everybody over here to adopt the krona so I wouldn't have to worry about the exchange rate.
Oh, wait--no, I didn't--I got my employer to transfer me to the US and start paying me in US currency.
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Yes.
Bitcoin shills are enamored with the concept of a deflationary-by-design currency, yet no one seems able to explain what to do about this little problem. An estimate i read a couple month ago was something like ~20% of all BTC mined so far is effectively lost.
Re: Isn't this the long term horizon of all Bitcoi (Score:2)
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I'm sorry, isn't there a "currency" attached to the "cryptocurrency" moniker?
Re: Isn't this the long term horizon of all Bitcoi (Score:2)
Just thinking about this more, it would seem to me that your best bet would be to buy, say, 1 Bitcoin and hold onto it for dear life. Given long enough, other Bitcoin will dwindle and yours will just increase in value. The idea of the value being dependent upon other peoples' incompetence (to lose their own Bitcoin) is unsettling.
I used to collect baseball cards (I guess I still do), and there are a lot of parallels with that in this regard. The value of a card is dependent (albeit not solely) upon how man
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Just thinking about this more, it would seem to me that your best bet would be to buy, say, 1 Bitcoin and hold onto it for dear life. Given long enough, other Bitcoin will dwindle and yours will just increase in value.
The problem is, it would also dwindle in usefulness - meaning, you'd have less and less miners in time, as there would be less and less transactions requiring them. And miners are essential to secure the network in Bitcoin's model..
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If you're enamoured with deflation, this isn't a problem. It's a feature.
Bitcoin proponents are the type who want to be able to stash their money away like a dragon sitting on a hoard of gold. That's not how money works. Just hoard index funds or something instead.
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Funny thing is, this is one of the easier problems with Bitcoin to fix, but the community is religiously against it.
All you'd have to do is add an activity timeout to ledger entries - you'd have to move your Bitcoin maybe every couple of years to prove it isn't 'lost'. Anything that doesn't move by the end of whatever the timeout period is gets opened up to the mining process again. It also wouldn't be a bad idea to have a criminal reporting process that the network could vote on to confiscate Bitcoin in
Re:Isn't this the long term horizon of all Bitcoin (Score:5, Interesting)
They are religiously against it because it inflates the "value" of their monopoly money. I have a dead friend who I know had some unknown amount as well. Those are also lost to history (to be fair, he was using them to buy drugs from the Silk Road, that's how old they were).
This is all part of the Ponzi. No whammies no whammies no whammies CASH OUT no you're fucked because you thought Smug Muskrat was gonna save you but he's a grifter too. I love that people think this guy is a genius when the prices goes up but are deafeningly silent when it drops 50%.
Remember, the bankers have a raging hard on for this trash, you should be running as far and as fast as possible when Goldman wants a piece.
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Good suggestions. You could also implement some kind of faster network so transactions can be posted quickly, then actually resolved later (they did this actually). Add in a dispute resolution system and you'd have a really nice system. Then all you need is a name. Maybe Interac? SEPA? Konbini?
Everybody seems to be into offering credit these days. You could mix that option in too. You could call it MasterCard, but "master" is kind of a dirty word. Maybe VISA?
There are ways to prevent this (Score:2)
It's called backups. For it to be secure you need to design it for your needs. And absolutely test that the backups work.
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This guarantees that bitcoin will continually be lost as their owners die, not by accident, but because their owners didn't care what would become of them after they died, certainly not enough to risk losing them during life.
On an individual level, surely you are encrypting these backups? Where are you keeping the super-secure passwords to all these
Dreams... (Score:2)
Let's assume that he is absolutely right, and the hard drive is there. What are the chances that (a) they actually find it, amidst 40,000 tons of waste, and (b) that it is still in any sort of working order? It would be very easy for the drive to have been crushed, or at least cracked or punctured, allowing corrosion to destroy the platters.
A bit of cold-blooded calculation is in order: what are the costs of digging up and carefully sorting through a landfill? We're talking hand-sorting here - nothing els
Re:Dreams... (Score:5, Interesting)
My question is: What kind of "IT worker" tosses a hard drive in the trash without destroying it first?
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My question is: What kind of "IT worker" tosses a hard drive in the trash without destroying it first?
I'd bet almost anything that he knows Windoze and nothing else.
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That isn't the insult you make it out to be given the complexity of keeping a Windows system running and secure compared to *NIX based systems.
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Exactly. Who would ever toss a hard drive without first harvesting those lovely lovely magnets. That is unless it was a SSD, then who cares?
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Re:Dreams... (Score:4, Funny)
You could improve your chances of finding it quite a bit. Use one of those big magnets to pull out the metal to start with.
All landfills are worth mining. (Score:2)
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Some landfills are 40% by volume used "disposable" nappies. (That's diapirs to Americans. Unless that means the washable fabric ones, not the "disposable" shredded paper and carboxymethylcellulose constructions you get in supermarkets, in adult and infant sizes.)
Simple solution. (Score:2)
Wait until the pyramid scheme crashes, then die happy because you don't have anything valuable in the landfill.
Buy the landfill (Score:3)
The obvious answer here is get an investor an acquire the landfill. Give the city another location and when the original landfill is yours, you do whatever you want with it.
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Who is going to invest in the extreme long shot of finding this drive and managing to recover the data off it though?
That's probably why the council isn't interested, they have likely asked some data recovery company what the chances are and decided it wasn't worth their time and money.
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No company dealing with hazardous materials gets to do what they want with them. The investor would need to invest huge amount of resources into both their safety and environmental cases to disturb a landfill. They literally turn into giant pits producing toxic and flammable gasses which like a pile of asbestos only remains safe if undisturbed.
You want to be pretty damn certain you're going to find recoverable data before you undertake something like this.
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He could also find an investor and offer 90% of all the bitcoins in the drive if it's found.
So that way the investor can decide if he / she wants to take the risk, and decide on paying out / buying out the landfill, etc.
Likewise he can offer the council 90% of the bitcoins, if it's found and let the council decide if it's willing to risk it (assuming they can take such risks legally). If found, they may have enough money to do a bunch of good things for the residents. If it's not found, they took the risk.
A
Custom Ground Penetration RADAR (Score:2)
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If GPR systems used a single frequency at a time, and you had some idea of the orientation of the device, and you assumed that there wasn't any corrosion leading to broken (or shorted) conductors in the structure, you might have a point. But they don't, so you don't.
The GPR systems I've worked with use a range of frequencies where water is a moderate (but not terribly strong) absorber, and attempt to map the distribution of water in the ground (or wellbore wal
No Electronic Waste Rules? (Score:2)
For the last decade, our communities here in suburban America have been under rules that do not allow including electronic waste in normal trash. Hard drives are included in that.
The local waste haulers strip as much of it out of the trash as they can, to avoid fines. Given how long ago this was, such e-waste could have been packed up in containers and shipped off to China for "recycling" in their landfills after shredding.
How does he know it it still buried locally?
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For the last decade, our communities here in suburban America have been under rules that do not allow including electronic waste in normal trash.
I take it no one ever drives over the speed limit in your town? Rules aren't followed well at all. In terms of waste you can see that by the tragically abysmal level of contamination in recyclables. There's rules against that too. No one cares.
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True, separation at the consumer level is low.
But even an aluminum-cased hard drive has enough ferrous metal in it to be picked up by the ferrous-metal separators installed at most waste facilities.
Such metals usually aren't buried if it can be avoided. And being shredded and melted has a tendency to scramble the bits on a hard drive.
Colour me sceptical ... (Score:2)
There are just so many reason to secpital of this story, nor least :-
He is a lying/troll/has some agenda
He is delusional
His memory is accurate
He still remember the pass phrase
Is the data even recoverable
How many years of garbage to sort through
What is the cost
Let it go (Score:2)
Just let it go man. Why torture yourself?
Really? (Score:2)
Not having an encrypted backup(s?) of valuable data such as a bitcoin wallet? Yikes! At the beginning of 2013, that wallet (assuming all "7500 Bitcoin" were present) would have been worth around $100k. That's....probably worth investing a small amount of effort to protect.
However, he should probably work with a therapist and try to move past this. Constantly thinking abou
Why toss a hard drive at all?! (Score:2)
They give up looking for bodies too (Score:2)
The local police gave up "missing person" enquiries a couple of years ago, citing a theory (with come CCTV support - yes, they looked) that after leaving his friends, he went to sleep in a "dumpster", and was still asleep in it when the emptying machine picked it up, threw it over i
Too late (Score:2)
This may explain the mole men that walked into the local Ferrari dealership with cash in hand.
Bitcoin ends up in trash heap (Score:2)
Re: Well, can't fix stupid ! (Score:3, Insightful)
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