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Bitcoin The Courts

Man Sues Town for $647 Million Over Trashed Bitcoin Hard Drive (vice.com) 126

smooth wombat writes: In 2013, James Howell's partner inadvertently threw out a hard drive along with other trash. Unknown to this person, this hard drive contained approximately 8,000 bitcoins. For the past decade Howell has been petitioning the town council of Newport to excavate the landfill in the hope of recovering the drive which would now hold approximately $647 million worth of cryptocurrency. Now he is suing the council in an attempt to force them to let him excavate.

Should the hard drive be recovered, Howells thinks there is an 80 percent chance that the coins on it would be retrievable. If it all works out, he has offered the council 10% of the recovered Bitcoin: $65 million worth. But, citing environmental concerns, the council has rejected his proposal to dig through over a decade's worth of garbage. The council issued a report wherein a spokesperson said, "The council has told Mr. Howells multiple times that excavation is not possible under our environmental permit and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area. The council is the only body authorized to carry out operations on the site."

Man Sues Town for $647 Million Over Trashed Bitcoin Hard Drive

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  • by Anonymous Coward
    There are no stupid questions, only stupid people.
  • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2024 @02:44PM (#64869669)

    Bury that dude in the landfill so he can be reunited with his beloved hard drive.

    • Bury that dude in the landfill so he can be reunited with his beloved hard drive.

      And they say you can’t take it with you, shows what they know!

    • You know what else is going to end up in the trash? His lawsuit.

      • by Pascoea ( 968200 )
        It would be funny if they held a ceremony to bury the lawsuit paperwork in the same landfill he wants to dig up.
  • 1. If trash was sorted before being put in the landfill, they'd've found the drive and put it in e-waste, which means it's likely been shredded
    2. Even if the above isn't true, if it's been sitting under tons of trash for however long, it's probably been contaminated to the point of not being recoverable, or it's just plain been physically damaged to the point of not being recoverable
    • The outer parts of the drive are certainly toast. But the magnetic media in spinning disks is very well sealed and the drive can likely still be read by removing the magnetic plates and using specialized equipment.
      • by Asgard ( 60200 )

        Don't layers of landfills get repeatedly compacted by heavy equipment?

      • Even though the drive is sitting in moisture and a mix of goop? I don't think they do that level of corrosion testing on hard drives. I know for water meters they're in probably the worst possible environment for electronics, given they're in a hole in the ground with rainwater carrying all sorts of chemicals from lawns and roads over them. A dump may be slightly less bad, but for a decades worth of stuff on top of the drive, with rainwater slowly leaking down and methane seeping around it, I wouldn't pl

      • I'm guessing you've never dissected a hard drive before. Air-filled drives are pretty much only sealed by aluminum foil tape. Ten years of marinating in landfill soup has almost certainly contaminated the interior portion of the drive.

      • But the magnetic media in spinning disks is very well sealed

        Hard drives had breathing holes for their entire existence until very recently in order to equalize pressure at different altitudes. These holes usually would have a paper filter to prevent dust ingress. That paper filter isn't going to last very long when exposed to literally decomposing trash and liquid.

        Want to try that again?

  • It makes me wonder sometimes - if you *expect* to make millions mining cryptocurrency, wouldn't it make sense to spend at least a few grand on an offsite backup?

    I mean, if his house had been washed away - like in the recent floods - he'd be in the same situation, except with a smaller chance of actually recovering the data.

    • If you backup your BTC to an offsite backup, somebody will get the data and steal your BTC. It's has all the downsides of cash and all the downsides of electronic currency.
      • It's has all the downsides of cash and all the downsides of electronic currency.

        No, it doesn't have all the downsides of cash.

        Contrary to what most articles are inferring, the bitcoins aren't on Mr. Howells' old hard drive. They're on the blockchain, just like every other bitcoin. Mr. Howells' problem is that he left the only copy of the private key on a hard drive that got tossed, so he has no way to spend the bitcoins in that wallet.

        So it isn't akin to losing bundle of cash in some landfill, but instead that the password to an account was forgotten. And there's no central authority (

        • The simplest would be to have transferred the coins to an exchange.

          Yep, that way when the exchange is "hacked" or rug-pulled, you don't have to stay up at night wondering how you're going to dig through ten years worth of trash to get your Bitcoin back, cause it's gone baby!

          You were doing so good up until this point, too.

        • by Pascoea ( 968200 )
          Or put the key on a thumb drive and keep that next to his stash of Penthouse magazines. Or. Or. Or. There are dozens of ways this could have been mitigated that don't involve digging up a landfill. I don't blame the city from telling him to go pound sand. It's a fools errand.
      • Now only if there was a way to encrypt a backup so that physical possession wasn't enough to read the data...

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      I don't really think that washed away in a flood gives you smaller chance of recovery then being deposited in a landfill for a decade or more. Either is likely to wreck the electronics, but the landfill is likely to corrode the platters. (Not sure if the bearings are likely to survive a flood, but it seems plausible.)

    • I mean, if his house had been washed away - like in the recent floods - he'd be in the same situation, except with a smaller chance of actually recovering the data.

      Who says the HD is even in that site - maybe someone stole his garbage before the city even picked it up.

    • It was a stupid oversight, but it happened within a much lower-stakes situation. In 2013, it was worth maybe $50k, which is still real money (of course you want backups), but not millions.

    • My guess is that no one back then was thinking this way. Bitcoins was still just a silly experiment and prices were very much smaller. Probably only in hindsight and rising prices that he started to wonder where his old dusty hard drive was.

    • if you *expect* to make millions mining cryptocurrency

      He didn't. Many early bitcoins were lost (by some estimates as high as 20% of all bitcoins ever mined). They had a value of fuck all at the time and people put no care into maintaining them. Bitcoin would have been trading around $10 at the time the drive was thrown away and he likely bought them for less than $1 each.

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2024 @02:57PM (#64869727)

    "A proprietary prototype storage device based on a PFAS organo-cadmium mercuric technology was accidentally disposed of in your dumpsite. I fear that the enclosure may be corroding and begin to leak its contents soon. As I am the only person in possession of the gear necessarily to render the device safe, I would be more than happy to locate, remove and neutralize it. Failing that, I can report this to the EPA and have a forty mile radius around the dump site declared uninhabitable and cleared of all the population."

    "Oh yeah. It's full of CO2 as well. Panic!"

    • by suutar ( 1860506 )

      Okay, and now you can't back out after they tell you how much it's going to cost you to do the excavation. Welcome to bankruptcy, whether you find the drive or not.

      • by PPH ( 736903 )

        how much it's going to cost you to do the excavation

        That's up to me. After all, it's very a specialized and sensitive type of hazardous waste. Following your regulations could result in a toxic release the likes of which you can't even imagine.

        Now step aside while me and "Bedrock Bob's Backhoe Service" get to work.

        • by suutar ( 1860506 )

          Yeah, no, the EPA wants a word with you about careless disposal of hazardous materials.

          • by PPH ( 736903 )

            the EPA wants a word with you

            My partner threw it away. And we're not on speaking terms anymore.

            Say ... while you are digging around in that dump, see if you can find her remains.

  • Has been digging in the trash for the past 10 years and has finally imaged the outline of what is possibly a 3.5" hard disk buried 25 feet below the surface by using satellite deep penetration radar imagery provided by NASA in the hope if solving at least part of US national debt of almost $35TN and lining the council's pocket when they recover the "7"000 bitcoin.
  • The council have their own guys working overtime trying to find it while they continue to hold off the owner.

    • It's likely if the council found the drive, they would still need a password to decrypt the wallet.
  • Madness lies.
  • Why should the city council be the people to fund this? He has a better chance by going to some VC or investor group willing to fund this fishing expedition and make an offer to the city. If he's got a believable story I'm sure there might be people willing to fund it.

    • They're not. The article states he has come up with the money to perform the dig so there wouldn't be any taxpayer money involved.

      It's everything else that myself and others alluded to further up which is the issue.

    • The city council isn't being asked to fund it, but the city council is smarter than this guy, because they asked the regulators and the landfill management what could happen if some dipshit starts digging around with a backhoe to find some arbitrary item the size of a paperback novel. And they heard what the EPA fines could be and decided to tell him to go fuck himself.

  • Hear me out: the community pay a small tax to give this bozo $1million and he enjoys the rest of his life, without digging up a million tonnes of crap. I'm pretty sick and tired of all the wasted energy and resources going into Bitcoin as it is, without morons suddenly wanting to expend even more recovering lost hardware!
    • Hear me out: the community pay a small tax to give this bozo $1million and he enjoys the rest of his life, without digging up a million tonnes of crap. I'm pretty sick and tired of all the wasted energy and resources going into Bitcoin as it is, without morons suddenly wanting to expend even more recovering lost hardware!

      So, your solution is to hand this bumbling fool money, thus advertising to the rest of the city that, if you just come up with a dumb enough scenario, the city council will hand you cash. I'm not sure that's much better than smashing environmental concerns for a drive. The correct solution is, "No. GTFO, idiot."

    • I'll do even better: the community just tells him to go fuck himself and they don't pay a single nickel.

      Oh wait, that's exactly what the community did through their representatives - the city council.

      This is why you have backups of important data. If it's not important enough to back up, then it's not important enough to risk massive environmental calamity to dig through several hundred tons of wildly toxic decomposing trash to look for.

  • Just get a ground-penetrating radar set and comb the thing end-to-end looking for any rectangular metal objects. Use a core-pipe driller to dig down to it and retrieve it.

    (Everything is easy when you don't consider the details!)

    However, unless it's in a waterproof container I'd guess it's already ruined and unrecoverable.

  • I'd just wait for the guy to die first, and then dig it out for 100% of the profits.

  • by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

    would you not put something that is more valuable than your house into a safe deposit box?!!

    Or at least a SAFE?!!

    • by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

      Maybe make a backup copy?!!

    • Because back when he threw it out, it was bitcoins were worth pennies, and thus this "haul" was worthless. The fact that it went up in price later is what is got him panicking.

  • Maybe if they sifted through the landfill with a really huge electromagnet to pull out the metal stuff... ;-)
    • and erase all the hard drives! Perfect!
      There's a chance the landfill may have already done this in the past, to recover recyclable materials and reduce the about stuff being buried.

  • who covers the cost of this if the drive is dead?

    Does he have the money in escrow to cover the expense of digging up the landfill? to cover the cost of interrupting operations at said landfil? sorting through it all of the waste? put everything back? and cover the costs in the event of damage? the cost of data recovery, likely from thousands of drives as others threw their drives out. Privacy concerns of data on those random drives. (if a drive with my data is dead... i don't always drill it... most peop

  • A hard drive that's been buried in trash for a decade is not going to be readable.
    They're not even hermetically sealed, they have vent holes to manage internal pressure as temperature changes.
    They also have a relatively thin steel cover, that's not going to last 10 years under ground.
    There is also the likely chance the thing has been physically damaged.

    On top of that, land fills are layered. They periodically cover the land fill with membranes to manage leachate and methane.
    This guy wants to dig through 10

  • The folks who owned them are dead, they just came to me over the years. Never bothered to look at them, nor had the equipment to mount the old things. The odds of anything valuable being on them are really low, but what is that old Chinese saying? After enlightenment the D-Wave? Something like that? https://thequantuminsider.com/... [thequantuminsider.com]
    Anyway, I would part with them for a few grand, if anyone is interestedâ¦. :)

  • He SAYS he is suing but has not and will not.

    The UK is not the US where everyone throws lawsuits around.

    No litigation funder will touch it as the reward isn't there [if he wins the council lets him dig but there is not money in that alone].

    Plus UK Courts take very dim views of speculative and frivolous legal action plus he would need to prove he has the means to pay the Councils costs which would be considerable if he loses.

    This prick has been at it for years and needs to get on with life.

When I left you, I was but the pupil. Now, I am the master. - Darth Vader

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