Judge Rejects Man From Retrieving $750 Million of Bitcoin From Landfill (crypto.news) 27
An IT engineer from Wales lost a decade-long legal battle to recover a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoins from a Newport landfill. The hard drive, accidentally thrown away in 2013, is now valued between $700-750 million. crypto.news reports: However, Judge Keyser KC ruled there were no "reasonable grounds" for the claim, citing environmental concerns and the council's ownership of the landfill contents. The landfill reportedly holds 1.4 million tonnes of waste, but Howells claims to have pinpointed the hard drive's location to a 100,000-ton section. Reacting to the ruling, Howells expressed frustration, calling it a "kick in the teeth," according to the BBC.
Idiot (Score:2)
Only thing dumber than fighting a court case for the right to dig through 100,000 tons of trash is expecting the hard drive that spent 12 years there to still be legible. Oh, and throwing out your bitcoins wasn't all that clever either.
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Ironically, he was probably defying or ignoring laws or regulations that forbid dumping electronic devices in common waste. He should have put in in the designated area of the dump. Of course, in that case it would have been taken apart and disposed of more thoroughly.
I'm lazy, but even I would do a daily backup if hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake. That's more than most sysops get in a lifetime.
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At the time it happened: bitcoin were worth nothing.
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by the time they potentially find the HDD, it will be worth nothing again.
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IIRC, that story has been going on for couple years at least...
(Reading TFS...)
Yeah, he threw it away in 2013 and I think the story became popular a little later when the price of Bitcoins skyrocketed and the guy decided he wanted his hard drive back so probably more than 2 years ago since I heard about it. I think his business partner threw the hard drive away etc. etc. etc.
I am curious if we are going to hear about this story again after that, like, say, the guy gets caught in the trash with a real miner
Re:Idiot (Score:5, Interesting)
He didn't throw it away as such. He put it in a black bin bag and left it in his hall. His girlfriend took it to the dump thinking it was trash. Still pretty stupid of him though.
This raises another point about Bitcoin though which I haven't ever seen discussed. If these coins are now irretrievable, what exactly happens to them? As far as I'm aware they just stay on the blockchain, assigned to a wallet that can never be opened. As Bitcoins are a finite resource, surely the value of these should be taken off the total value of Bitcoin? They are in effect worthless. It's as if you've invested in gold then dropped it into a volcano. How much of the total amount of Bitcoin are in this state, where they can never be redeemed? This isn't the first such case I've heard of. And if this keeps happening, sooner or later all Bitcoin will be in this state.
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Man theres not a lot of people that can point to an ex girlfriend and say "That B**** cost me nearly a billion dollars!" lol
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He put it in a black bin bag
This is why I avoid using opaque plastic bags for storing important stuff that I want to find later. If you can't see inside it, it might as well not exist until you go poking into every bag to see what you even have. (The other reason is that my mom sometimes used to use those to store stuff, and after ten years in the attic, they all turn into black plastic flakes. Because they were made as trash bags, not storage bags, duh!)
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So it's probable that the disc was crushed, shredded and melted anyway.
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he was probably defying or ignoring laws or regulations that forbid dumping electronic devices in common waste.
Not him. The Woman; his romantic partner/SO who collected and dumped his hard drive with a pile of junk effectively without permission.
I'm lazy, but even I would do a daily backup if hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake.
Hundreds of millions were not at stake the day the hard drive was lost. He could have easily replaced it back then at a much lower cost.
The drive was lost in 2013. In 2
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They're not expecting it to just "be legible". They have a forensics lab on their team that plans to disassemble the drive and do the most advanced manual data physically possible. The lab believes they can recover it.
Even if they lose some bits, every bit recovered halves the search space.
I understand that this was thrown out by accident, but still, I'm always shocked by how people just throw away hard drives. They're (potentially offsite) unhackable backups of all of your content as of that date. Put
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It's just rubbish (Score:2)
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Bitcoin is only "worth" what suckers pay for it, trying to "cash out" such an amount of imaginary coins will show its "real" value (it's called dumping for a reason). The hard drive is worth more in the dump. All the big "hodlers" like Microstrategy have might as well thrown their hard drives in the dump as well. I also support throwing funko pops and Pokemon cards in the dump for the same reason.
Today, "dumping" 8000 btc even at once would be worth about 2% of daily traded bitcoin value, barely a blip on the radar. Also, fiat currency is also worth only what "suckers" will give you for it. Quaint leftist fantasy of how it's purely about "taxman wats dollars and will throw you in jail if he doesn't get them" notwithstanding. How many dollars that will be circulated this year will be given to taxman, 0.00001%?
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Fiat currency is a system backed up by the power of taxes, which is a system backed up by the power of weapons.
Why, exactly, did you think that fiat currency is so vastly more stable than Bitcoin? Bitcoin is purely speculative. Fiat currency has fundamentals (a government that makes up like a quarter to a third of your entire economy, which demands it as its means of exchange).
Bitcoin is also a Dunning-Kruger version of how to run
what's the problem? (Score:2)
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Stupid comment.
How can he dig around in the landfill, if the owner of the landfill does not let him?
Boing? Boing! BOING!!!???
It is private property. Fenced. And most likely has even guards!!!
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That's funny. Guarding garbage. An empire of dirt.
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Prettty much everything you said is true.
But this isn't a normal man. He's a moron who thinks he was a bitcoin miner 13 years ago and wishes his hard drive is happily spinning in the dump ready for him to do WHAT EXACTLY?
Maybe those BTCs were only worth $8K instead of $90K. I'll bite. So instead of it being "worth" $700M it would have been worth $80M.
Anyone STUPID ENOUGH to have no backups of "owning" 80 million dollars and throwing out the hard drive, I mean come on, this is a Darwin Award waiting to be
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Anyone STUPID ENOUGH to have no backups of "owning" 80 million dollars and throwing out the hard drive, I mean come on, this is a Darwin Award waiting to be handed over... in garbage.
Apparently, that hard drive was his only backup [slashdot.org] of his Bitcoins. Double award for him!
Venture capital, anyone? (Score:2)
The guy has offered the council 1/4 of the loot.
If I were the mayor, I would be demanding the money up front as reparations for any cleanup required to re-bury everything.
This guy should launch a go-fund-me and he'd have the cash in a week! LOL, what?
Sorry mate but you're just have to eke out a meager existence like the rest of us poor sods who never made it rich.
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Your Bullshit Headline (Score:2)
You cryptocucks have misrepresented this story consistently.
"Judge Rejects Man From Retrieving $750 Million of Bitcoin From Landfill"
should be
"Judge Denies Man's Request to Waste Time and Money Looking for Broken Hard Drive in Landfill"
If they are sorting their trash at a transfer station, the HDD has been sorted out and recycled. If they are not, then it's been banged around aggressively and destroyed. Either way there's no pot of gold at the end of that landfill.
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You cryptocucks have misrepresented this story consistently.
"Judge Rejects Man From Retrieving $750 Million of Bitcoin From Landfill"
should be
"Judge Denies Man's Request to Waste Time and Money Looking for Broken Hard Drive in Landfill"
Actually, it should be:
... since he's unwilling to put up the money up front (estimated to be $1Billion according to last story on this) to ensure he doesn't skip town with an environmental hazard for the town to deal with when his search fails.
From the moment you throw trash away.. (Score:2)