Originally published at: Man sues council for £495m over a lost Bitcoin hard drive in landfill - Boing Boing
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I can’t imagine why they’d turn down the requests of the sort of gentleman who thinks that those are utopian outcomes.
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Or that you could do something like that for a measly $500M
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I want to know what kind of hermetically sealed indestructible case he packaged this accidently discarded hard drive in. A decade in a land fill and he thinks it’s still salvageable? Something isn’t passing the sniff test and it’s just not the garbage.
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I’m not sure I’ve ever run into a crypto bro who is either particularly realistic about project management or other than utterly convinced that they can drag other people’s money down with them.
And that’s ignoring the obvious “because of course you’ll dedicate yourself to building a particularly vulgar paradise at home, which will involve years of work, when you can just fuck off to somewhere sunny and never work again for considerably less than 500 million” question of actual intention.
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Millions lost in a landfill…
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Howell’s told WalesOnline that filed the suit to compel the council into action:
Newport Council, “
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Is there a field among many ‘non-standard’ bitcoin database fields to designate “likely lost ownership?” Or said in the geeky vocal tones of one who improperly thinks of blockchains like filesystems: are there any possible “defrag”/lost sector recovery routines available for bitcoin blockchains?
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(Sues council, wins, they agree to dig up the landfill. A year later, they find the USB drive)
Okay! Let’s plug it in and see…oh. It was 8 POINT zero zero zero bitcoin. I could have sworn it was 8 zero zero zero bitcoin. Oh well!
(council members roll up their sleeves, crack their knuckles, grab assorted implements of harm)
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Newport? Think Florida but cold grey and damp. And without Disney or anything.
They are absolutely utopias compared to Newport.
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There are so many low probability steps to this.
- Find the drive. (before the £10million runs out, because this will be expensive and slow.)
- Not destroy what’s left of it in the excavation process.
- The platters remain sealed.
- A lab can still read the data on the platters.
And yet he’s trying to bribe the council as if it was a sure thing. When it failed, I bet he would sue the council again.
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Just the kind of financial genius you’d expect to be all-in on cryptocurrency. I hope he likes laughter, because there will be a lot of it ushering him out of the courtroom.
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Sometimes I think I should have acquired some crypto back in the day when it was a new thing. Except I would probably have stored it in one of those online exchanges like Mt. Gox, from where it would have been lost or stolen. Of course, there is no deposit insurance for such entities. As this example shows, having your crypto on physical hardware does not necessarily protect you, either.
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- Perhaps it’s his reasoning abilities that wouldn’t pass the sniff test.
- Something like the ‘flipside’, but still a fool:
Mr. Howells says he has assembled a team of experts who would carry out the £10million dig at no cost to the council. (Scamming “dig” investors on what he knows to be a wild goose chase?)
He is also offering the council 10% of the coins’ value if recovered…
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And depending on the landfill, they might segregate ewaste out from the regular trash. And if the drive was still functional, It would have gotten wiped in the process of refurbishing. If it wasn’t functional? might have been put through a shredder.
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Wait a minute - it’s actually Bitcoin cash!?
Or perhaps you would have forgotten/lost the key, like one guy I know who got some bitcoin very early on just out of curiosity and never expected the price to increase so dramatically. Or perhaps you would have sold it at the wrong time, thinking that the price had just peaked when it turned out that you lost out on a fortune by selling at the wrong time. There are many scenarios that could lead to profound, lasting disappointment.
I don’t regret for a second that I steered clear of the whole thing.
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I don’t think he has a case. In English law, when you throw something out and the council take it away in the normal course of their duties to collect household waste, it becomes their property. People have been prosecuted for trash diving on council tips.
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If he still had the drive, it probably would have failed by now, and he was too stupid to keep backups or multiple copies. It’s not a dragon hoard, it’s computer data. Put a copy on a thumb drive, encrypted with a memorable passphrase, hide it somewhere or throw it in a safety deposit box.
(I’m restoring from backup, right now!)
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Most landfills also use big electromagnets to get ferrous scrap from the trash, so an hard drive is destroyed just after entering the landfill area.
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