Wasn’t Newport always heralded as the “new Seattle” because of its thriving music scene? But, yeah, you’re right, it’s got a lot of Florida in it too.
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Who throws hard drive in the bin?
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That’s pretty much what happened to me.
Easy come, easy go. I didn’t bet any actual money on it. And like you, I wouldn’t touch the stuff today.
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Hopefully the excavators have the sense to ask for cash up front.
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I recently finished Jason Pargin’s novel I’m Starting to Worry About this Black Box of Doom, a comedic thriller in which a long-lost cache of Bitcoin that ends up being worth many orders of magnitude more than anyone expected plays a major role in the lives of several characters.
Bitterness over what might have been sure seems to be a recurring theme in the “easy come, easy go” world of cryptocurrency. Even for people who didn’t lose money, there are always those who can’t stop obsessing about how rich they’d be if [friend or family member] hadn’t advised them against investing in the scheme back at the beginning.
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If you throw something out you lose ownership of it. The government workers have probably already found it and are living the high life in Belize. 
He should have offered a 50% finders fee early on.
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Fly-tipping is a problem in Britain’s rural areas. I wonder if anyone ever accidentally fly-tipped a computer with a load of Bitcoins in it, went back to recover it but it was gone.
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James Howells, for one. 
He sure Howells now!
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Is it James Howells rattling on about his Bitcoin season already?
I didn’t even have time to get a card.
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The sort of person who apparently keeps an unlabelled hard disk containing valuable data in a drawer for three years. From 2013:
“Fast forward to 2013 which is when I had a clearout of my old IT equipment - I hadn’t used this drive for over three years, I believed I’d taken everything off it… so it got thrown in the bin.”
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This reminds me of movies about the mob, where they devote huge amounts of time and energy to planning a crime, where they could have been using that time and energy to do something worthwhile. This guy had been whinging on about his “lost fortune” instead of doing anything else to make his life worthwhile. What a wanker.
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I went through the hard drive stash of my media archive, which has a bunch of old drives in it (including some that I can’t even read), and my process with the ones I could was all the same: attach them to my disk salvage system, fire them up and see what data’s on them, and remove anything I wanted to save before wiping them and putting them in the “send over to the recycler” box. (along with notatng what I couldn’t read, what was damaged, etc.)
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Around here, there are drop-offs for electronics, batteries, paint, etc, so that lead and other nasties don’t go into the landfill. Don’t they do the same in the UK?
If so, lazy and dumb.
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Most Councils have recycling centres which will accept electronic waste.
In addition, (although I don’t know if this was the case in 2013), all electronic retailers of more than 400 sq m MUST take small electronic waste (less than 25cm per side) for recycling - whether or not the item was bought in the store.
Electrical waste: retailer and distributor responsibilities: Take back waste in store - GOV.UK.
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I haven’t seen anywhere an explanation of why they turned him down.
Seems like a no loss scenario for them. Is this just pure British ruleminding? “Nothing in the rules says you can so you cannot.”
I do the same. I also actually label my hard drives with Dymo tape, and keep a notebook of what’s on them and the encryption keys.
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I think WEEE was round about 2013 but the councils took electrical waste from long before that.
I just checked, 2012 Directive of the EU.
They seem like they have been in force forever. Maybe retailers took in recycling when you bought from them before that? Last time I went to a council electrical recycling place was around 2008 I think.
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Would they completely shut down the facility while the $10M of excavation is going on? Are they going to just keep adding more stuff on top as they dig? What type of impact is digging and shifting everything going to have? What are the environmental risks of disturbing everything?
As others have pointed out, electronics are supposes to be disposed of separate from the normal trash. So, either he did that and it isn’t in the site anyway, as e-waste had a different disposal path. Or, he ignored those rules and disposed of it in an unapproved way adding to the hazards of the landfill. Possible mystery third option, he disposed of it correctly and the council mixed it all together anyway, but I doubt this one.
There’s no upside to allowing him to sift through the entire site and lots and lots of different downsides.
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When this story originally broke - eleven long years ago - the Council made it very clear that this would require some or all of the waste facility to be shut down, the waste stored and sorted with no reasonable chance of them recovering their costs, let alone the additional burden of finding the necessary workers, performing additional environmental protections and finding somewhere to keep the waste.
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