How many times is this guy going to keep coming back with his ‘woe is me’ story? It’s becoming something of a tradition to hear how the Council won’t help him when he made a mistake.
Tell you what - why doesn’t he go away and raise funds from investors who would be willing to risk money on the off chance the disk is a) there, and b) readable. They could use that to fund an excavation with all the necessary liability insurance; then go back to the Council and negotiate access so his people can do the work without distracting from the essential services provided by an underfunded, understaffed local government.
Well, supposedly when he bought or mined those bitcoins they were still worth nearly nothing and looked like an interesting mathematical pipedream.
I know, I’ve been in the same place sortof (not 500 million) back when bitcoins were ~70 eurocent a piece I have had ~25 of them. Mined them myself when they were even less and bought some in the hope it would be a feasible alternative to paypal. Because paypal were (are, probably) untrustworthy.
At a certain point in time it looked like my €18 in BTC might soon be worth €0, so I spent them on a month rent for a VPS. No I sortof wished I had held on to them, but that’s all hypothetical. Also I’d be bothered by the energy usage (though, I must admit probably not bothered enough to throw away 25*50000 dollar or whatever btc is worth these days).
Even if he could somehow effectively sort the many tons of refuse, a landfill that size that’s been open that long probably has hundreds, if not more, other hard drives that were thrown out by other people. If he didn’t have a way of being certain which was his just by looking at it, that means he’d need to view the private data of many other people just to find his drive. Not cool.
And when he tossed the drive, they were already worth over $1 million. If I found out I had $1 million somewhere in the house, I’d probably look for it.
One day all possible bitcoin will have been mined. And then later, all bitcoin will be unrecoverable due to lost passwords, lost hardware, or lost lives. It’s just a matter of time. But all praise the blockchain! The blockchain shall live eternally, proving that these bitcoin were once usable or something.
Allowing that guy to dig up the dump creates zero value for society and I agree with the city. But I do feel sorry for the guy. This has been going on for years. It seems like he’d be much happier if he could forget about it and move on with his life, but I don’t think he can.
I’m going to start a “lost your bitcoin” insurance company. It will insure your bit coin against accidental loss. The price is just a payment of 150% of your insured bitcoin, in bitcoin. Claims must be made within 24 hours of loss and will pay out in an equivalent number of bit coins, not in the cash equivalent.
Maybe laws are different in Wales, but I believe that anything that is in the landfill belongs to the municipality. He gave it to them when he binned it. In any case, sifting through a landfill would require a large hazmat team and cost millions to find it. And glass hard drives are not as tough as they are cracked up to be.
Note that that research is from 1989, when harddrives had a much lower data density, newer research is much less optimistic.
The days when the polarity of a particular magnetic domain meant a 1 or 0 in the original file is long gone. The complexity and precision of modern hardrives makes them almost impossible to retrieve any data from, and you’d need to recover large parts of the disk to be able to actually convert that into the original files. Plus, the speed of reconstruction would make the entire enterprise unfeasible. Basically, if there any damage to the platters, then no data is coming back.
Honestly, the way modern hardrives work, it’s practically a miracle that they even store data in the first place.
