Man Sues Town for $647 Million Over Trashed Bitcoin Hard Drive (vice.com) 167
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."
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."
Here's an alternative option (Score:5, Funny)
Bury that dude in the landfill so he can be reunited with his beloved hard drive.
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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!
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You know what else is going to end up in the trash? His lawsuit.
Re:Here's an alternative option (Score:4, Funny)
Unlikely (Score:3)
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
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Don't layers of landfills get repeatedly compacted by heavy equipment?
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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
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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.
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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?
8000 bitcoins but no backup... (Score:2)
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.
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Downside of cash, but not a downside of BTC (Score:2)
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 (
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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.
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Now only if there was a way to encrypt a backup so that physical possession wasn't enough to read the data...
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Back *very* early in bitcoins history I was offered 1000BTC for about $100, roughly 20c per coin. I laughed it off amd said it was monopoly money.
I still think its silly monopoly money, but I *dearly* wish I could go back in time and tell myself "Dude, spend every cent you own on that monopoly money and then, put multiple backups in a bank safe deposit box and sit on it till the 2020s, you'll be a billionare."
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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.
Wrong request (Score:5, Funny)
"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!"
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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.
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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.
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Yeah, no, the EPA wants a word with you about careless disposal of hazardous materials.
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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.
Conspiracy theory.... (Score:2)
The council have their own guys working overtime trying to find it while they continue to hold off the owner.
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That way (Score:2)
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The ground is sour.
Alternative solution? (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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.
Alternative solution (Score:2)
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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."
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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.
It'd be easy (Score:2)
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 find your lack of optimism disturbing (Score:2)
A dinky little hard-drive should be easy.
If I was the city... (Score:2)
I'd just wait for the guy to die first, and then dig it out for 100% of the profits.
Why (Score:2)
would you not put something that is more valuable than your house into a safe deposit box?!!
Or at least a SAFE?!!
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Maybe make a backup copy?!!
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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.
Rolleyes - The HDD has been damaged beyond repair (Score:2)
I've got an idea! (Score:2)
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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? (Score:2)
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
He's on drugs, right? (Score:2)
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
Man, I got some old hard drives. (Score:2)
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¦.
Moron (Score:2)
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.
Re:What environmental impact?!?! (Score:5, Informative)
If some low-rent backhoe operator goes through the liner at the bottom that prevents the landfill waste from leeching into the ground water, they can do quite a bit of ecological damage.
Please learn something about landfill operations. It's not just a big hole in the ground.
Also, why is the city / county / state responsible for him and his dipshit associate throwing away something of value? They voluntarily placed it in the municipal waste service's pickup container, which makes it no longer their property anyway.
This is no different than if some dipshit threw away a check for $100m accidentally, except you can't stop payment and reissue bitcoin. Caveat Emptor, buddy. Sounds like a whole lot of his problem, and none of the city's.
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Exactly this, he gave it to the waste collection so it's now the property of the town council to do with as they please.
He was stupid for not keeping backups of such valuable data.
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The backup is not to protect against theft, it's to protect against loss. Loss is what this guy has suffered.
Encryption protects against theft, and can be another cause of loss if the keys are not properly managed. But this guy's coins have not been stolen, so it's a moot point.
The council is clearly not interested in trying to recover the hard drive, and we have no idea if it's encrypted or not either.
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Now who's the one that doesn't know how bitcoin works...
The blockchain is public, if they had been stolen and transferred to another wallet there would be a visible record of that on the blockchain.
No thief would keep the coins in the original wallet because they have no guarantee the original owner won't have a backup and move them.
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It is still foolhardy to have No backup. Hard drives fail, or in some cases they get lost.
What you should do is write down the backup seed words for your wallet on hard medium and lock them in a safe deposit box Or other similar location where you will always have them. To guard against theft: You can actually divide them into different portions, and Lock different ones up in Safe deposit boxes at different banks. Nobody can recover the wallet without figuring out both the entire seed and p
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It says the HARD DRIVE was thrown away by someone else. Not his computer. Why couldn't the hard drive be considered a backup?
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If he had another copy of the data somewhere else nodoubt he'd have accessed it by now - that's certainly much easier than trying to dig through landfill or filing a lawsuit against a government agency.
But there's also the irresponsibility of his partner - throwing out someone else's belongings without checking with them first. I would be absolutely livid if someone did that. What you might see as trash, might hold sentimental value to me, and something like a hard drive could contain all manner of importan
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You've probably heard the expression "a needle in a haystack"? Well it's like that except the haystack is the size of a landfill and the hay is rotting decomposing garbage.
There's also a very good likelihood there's plenty of hard drives in that landfill already, so even if they find a hard drive it probably won't be the one he's looking for. So that's multiple needles in a big nasty toxic haystack, and you won't even know if you've found the right one until you've dug all of them out.
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only if people and cities recycled their stuff!! a hard drive would be reused or scraped parts, generating value... and stopping this nonsense, as he would give up already... but as there is a (small) change to recover the HD, he is sticking to trying to recover it.
Also, he should have made a backup!!
Re:What environmental impact?!?! (Score:4, Funny)
If some low-rent backhoe operator
Nope. You've probably already got a team of hobos digging through the trash piles. Just offer a case of mad Dog to whomever locates the disk.
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If only there was a "+1, Sad Commentary on Society" rating.
Re:What environmental impact?!?! (Score:5, Informative)
If some low-rent backhoe operator goes through the liner at the bottom that prevents the landfill waste from leeching into the ground water, they can do quite a bit of ecological damage.
To elaborate, Sanitary landfills are not just places to dump trash and that's it. That liner at the bottom is just one part. Trash is placed and spread out in a layer, then it is covered with regular dirt. There are pipes to collect the methane as well. We might think of it as a garbage lasagna. The issue is that everything that gets excavated has to be replaced. If just excavated then dumped back in willy nillly, it will allow methane to escape, and the landfill won't operate correctly from then on.
What would be needed is create a temporary landfill beside the old one, then peel the regular landfill back like layers of an onion. So almost certain to dwarf the cost of whatever the idiot had on a hard drive that might be anywhere, and may or may not be recoverable.
We also have to keep in mind that the trash in the landfill gets compacted with huge bulldozers before putting a dirt layer, then run over again. Even a medium size D-7 dozer is a big heavy chonk. So the hard drive is probably mashed flat by now.
Re:What environmental impact?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably not mashed flat, but cracked and corroded into total unrecoverability.
Re:What environmental impact?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Right the reality here is doing this right is going to be a very expensive. Everyone around here complains bitterly about how $PARTY should be responsible for externalized costs. So we can't very well say hey this guy should be excused from environmental rules around digging, and disposable procedures.
Even if he is 'willing to pay for it' that assumes he find ts the disk right? What if he does not or the disk has been destroyed (It probably has)? Then what he declares bankruptcy and the tax payers get left holding the bag! Right? That is his real plan right? It is almost like the council thought this thru when denying the permits.
Now in fairness I think the council should say - "We will do a study to estimate the entire cost of the project, at your expense if you'd like" When that estimate is known if you are willing to place 140% of that figure in escrow with a third party before the first shovel gets picked up, have it. That way they can be certain the money is there to complete all the cleanup and remediation activities at the outset.
My guess is Mr.Howell won't find this little expedition so attractive when and neither will any would be creditors when they can't shit a lot of the failure risk onto the town.
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So almost certain to dwarf the cost of whatever the idiot had on a hard drive that might be anywhere, and may or may not be recoverable.
Yeah.. that's the thing. 10% Of the value of the hard drive is Nowhere near enough for the trouble. They need to be offering the City like $50 Million up-front for this project plus 10% of the salvage AND make a cash outlay to cover all those expenses, So the city itself does Not bear the risk if the excavation fails to recover anything of value.
It's most likely the
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Bitcoin is apparently disposable - by design!
And he didn't throw out that many millions in dollars worth of bitcoin, because it was worth vastly less back then, so much less that he didn't bother making a backup and didn't panic about it until the value started going up. By throwing out the bitcoin, he should consider it a voluntary donation to the municipal sanitation department!
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They voluntarily placed it in the municipal waste service's pickup container, which makes it no longer their property anyway.
It's placed there Not knowingly by the owner. Which makes it still their property. They never agreed to release title to the hard drive.
However; It would seem that the property has been lost for quite some time and Probably is no longer operable.
I would argue that it is wishful thinking at best that they think they could recover anything off the disk assuming they successfully exc
Re:What environmental impact?!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow. Not even an attempt to find out if what you're suggesting is reasonable. Well done.
For a similar case, see: https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.69033... [www.cbc.ca]
Searching a landfill is not done by stomping around looking under shit.
This dingus should be laughed out of the courtroom.
Re:What environmental impact?!?! (Score:5, Informative)
Modern landfills are most certainly not "trash heaps". They are carefully designed and engineered to prevent leaching, contamination and outgassing over a long timeframe. They have carefully constructed foundations and plumbing at the bottom with waterproof membranes that must not be punctured.
What he proposes almost certainly involves creating a whole new landfill and carefully transferring all of the contents to it while looking for this one tiny drive. If he wants to do that, he should find financial backers willing to foot the cost up front.
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He needs to go through a decade of trash. Rather than say no to him, they should request a project plan, environmental assessment, and budget estimate for review.
I bet he can't even handle that reasonable request. And if he does somehow, the plan will be unacceptable. But if it's acceptable, you know he won't have the money to fund it. But if he did, I'd give him the green light - it would be amusing to watch him blow all that money looking for an unreadable drive.
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>But if it's acceptable, you know he won't have the money to fund it.
I read about this guy before, he has figured out how to fund it. Basically he partners with investors and promises them X% of the loot. If an investor estimates 20% chance to recover the $650 million, that easily justifies spending $10m on lawyers and trucks etc. As for the rest of your proposal, it is the obvious and well-worn playbook of modern bureaucrats looking to slow things down until the petitioner ages out of trying things.
Re:What environmental impact?!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't have some random guy moving ten year's worth of trash around without ensuring it is done in a way that doesn't cause more environmental issues than just leaving it in the landfill.
Ensuring an acceptable project plan exists and that he has money to pay for it is NOT just red tape for the sake of frustrating an inconvenient citizen.
Sometimes bureaucracy is good and working in the citizens' best interests.
Re: What environmental impact?!?! (Score:2)
If he moves the landfill contents in such a way as to leech contaminants into the groundwater, he absolutely COULD do serious damage to a very large number of people for a very long period of time.
This guy just needs to make peace with the fact that he came close to being rich, but didn't. He's really being eaten alive by this, and he's throwing away what he does have (health, time) for what might have been.
I pity him.
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He needs to go through a decade of trash. Rather than say no to him, they should request a project plan, environmental assessment, and budget estimate for review.
I bet he can't even handle that reasonable request. And if he does somehow, the plan will be unacceptable. But if it's acceptable, you know he won't have the money to fund it. But if he did, I'd give him the green light - it would be amusing to watch him blow all that money looking for an unreadable drive.
This feels like a plotline on Silicon Valley. I'll bet this guy fucks.
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Re:What environmental impact?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure if there's ever been a more appropriate sig for someone.
Digging in a landfill is not remotely the same as digging a hole in your backyard. You would be digging up tons of decaying food, body parts (unknown to the landfill owner), noxious chemicals (unknown to the landfill owner), who knows what liquids, and a whole host of other dangerous products which people throw away rather than properly disposing of. And this is on top of the usual clothes, plastic and metal products, batteries of all sizes, furniture, etc. Where do you propose all this junk gets put as it's dug up?
How do you stop the liquids from contaminating ground water? How do you clear the stench of decay which would happen the moment this stuff is exposed to the air? Once you do dig it up, how do you prevent the hordes of animals who would inevitably descend upon the site from showing up?
These are just the questions off the top of my head. Those who deal with this stuff certainly have entire books on the subject.
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Hence why modern landfills have what is called a "liner" at the bottom.
More specifically, a modern landfill has a compacted clay layer at the bottom, then an impermeable membrane on top of that, and a leachate collection system. Plus groundwater monitoring wells.
And it can be that as trash is deposited, additional layers of soil coverings and impermeable membranes can be added.
Not to mention other systems that may be found in modern landfills, like met
Re:What environmental impact?!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Are they serious...?
How the fuck much damage can someone cause just digging through a fucking landfill/trash heap??
Will it cause the town to die, catch a cold....have birds fall from the fucking sky?
Geez, let the guy go dig....shit....his taxes paid for the place, let him go wade through it if he wants....
Landfills are not just places where we throw trash. Here's an example of modern landfills: https://www.dumpsters.com/blog... [dumpsters.com]
The trash is layered and filled over. Sanitary landfills do methane collection as well, they are surprisingly precise, and can be wrecked if not arranged properly.
To excavate, store the excavations temporarily, and create a temporary landfill then continue to excavate until the hard drive he pitched is found - if it is found - he's proposing excavation of the entire landfill, creating another landfill of the same size, then replacing everything he took out in the same fashion as the sanitary land fill has to be re-constructed.
It could make the 647 million he thinks is on the hard drive might make for a part of the cost of that mess. Assuming that he finds it, assuming that the bitcoin is recoverable.
I mean he doesn't sound like the sharpest pencil in the box, tossing a hard drive without wiping it, or destroying the hard drive (I prefer the second amendment solution of target practice on any I'm tossing, then a sledge hammer to compact them.
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How many people need to tell you that you're just wrong about this before you accept that you might be wrong about this?
You keep repeating the same stupid crap, and even more people keep responding with how you're wrong, with details.
And "nobody lives there" is about the dumbest reason I can think of to allow someone to cause unnecessary environmental damage. Well, behind thinking that you're going to excavate an entire landfill looking for a particular hard disk, and hoping that it will still be functiona
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Well, behind thinking that you're going to excavate an entire landfill looking for a particular hard disk, and hoping that it will still be functional after being compacted several times under massively heavy equipment and being exposed to any chemical you can probably think of while corroding away in whatever liquid has ingressed into the drive chassis.
Just stop.
Landfill leachate. Nasty, gross, poisonous and acidic stuff , although sometimes has ammonia https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
From my cite - "he most hazardous products of such leachate are four major types of constituents: soluble organic matters, inorganic components, heavy metals, and xenobiotic organic compounds. Leachates of high concentrations from these components in the early acid phase are mainly due to strong decomposition."
It does then go through a secondary decomposition, when it produces
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Are they serious...? How the fuck much damage can someone cause just digging through a fucking landfill/trash heap??
Digging in a landfill is a huge risk for many reasons. Firstly there's the direct risk associated with the waste itself. Waste despite mediocre efforts is not normally separated so there's all manner of potentially hazardous things buried in the waste, from the chemical, e.g. improperly disposed of chemicals, to the biological - e.g. several year old literally shitty diaper or menstrual blood kept nice and moist under the pile are an insane harbour of bacteria. In many cases when they are first disposed of
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How the fuck much damage can someone cause just digging through a fucking landfill/trash heap??
Where do you think they are going to place the dirt and other buried materials that they "dug up" from the landfill?
They can very easily stir up harmful waste and cause it to get released into the local environment.
Even if they manage to retrieve the hard drive - there is a high chance that nothing is recoverable from it; As it's been exposed to the elements, and very likely been exposed to contamination by liqui
three comma club (Score:3)
Re: How do you get the money? (Score:3)
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The daily trading volume of Bitcoin is about 40B USD. So while $600M is a lot, it's 2% of the daily trading volume.
By comparison, Berkshire Hathaway recently unloaded ~$1.5B of Bank of America stock, which is close to a full day of trading volume for that stock. The sale was spread over multiple days.
So how does he on-ramp the BTC to begin with? He could transfer it to a centralized exchange. They'll first need to verify who he is and that the BTC didn't come from illicit activities, which will be easy to
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lol
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To be hones, just about everyone cares more about their personal financial gain than the environmental impact. But there are degrees and degrees, and the odds of recovery here are extremely poor, even if you find the drive. (If I really cared more about environmental impact, I wouldn't be posting this message.)
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Once you put your trash out for pickup, you no longer have an expectation of privacy; you are literally expecting another party to take posession of it.
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To wit: there are several examples of law enforcement using curbside trash as probable cause for search warrants of drug houses.
If you put it on the curb for trash day, it's no longer yours. It's the refuse hauling service's property when they pick it up, as is undoubtedly outlined in their contracts.
It's very likely not his drive anymore from a legal perspective.
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IIRC, that's been decided. Once you put your garbage out for pickup, you have abandoned your property, and anyone can claim it. There may be laws against picking through that garbage, but they won't be based around your ownership.
Wouldn't it be funny if the HD wasn't even there t (Score:2)
IIRC, that's been decided. Once you put your garbage out for pickup, you have abandoned your property, and anyone can claim it..
Wouldn't it be hilarious if the hard drive he's seeking to find was never there in the first place, because someone else picked up his trash before the city did, and now those Bitcoins are all in someone else's possession?
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Am I the only one who's annoyed by the recent redefinition of "partner"?
No. But it's a small group with a pretty narrow set of shared "grievances".
"Partner" suggests a business or law firm, etc
It also suggests spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife, fiance just as well.
What was wrong with the more expressive "boyfriend" and "girlfriend"?
Nothing. What's wrong with "partner" when you don't feel the need or desire to be more expressive? (Other than it bothers a very small group of people, of course.)
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A) That's what you get for not recycling electronics.
How would that've helped? Unless you're implying it would've brought closure to this situation since the guy would know for certain that the drive has been reformatted.
B) That's what you get when you don't back up stuff.
Technically you can even write down your wallet info on good old fashioned paper. This was more a failure of understanding cryptocurrency than being lousy at making backups.
C) Make a deal with the landfill owners: 'You get half if we're successful.'
Ultimately, it's still up to the city to grant or deny the necessary permits.
D) Am I the only one who's annoyed by the recent redefinition of "partner"?
Yep, that's all you. I use the term because when I say "husband" people tend to mistakenly
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