🎵Money for nothing and checks for free🎶
bitcoin is just gambling and yall dropped your lotto ticket.
Drives probably rusted away to nothing by now, even if he miraculously could find it the odds of getting anything from it are probably less than him winning the lottery.
Technicians can work wonders as long as the seals to the spinny bits are intact. It would be cool to see even if it’s just bitcoin
And if he does find it, 500m will pay for a lot of technicians
Technicians that will probably demand a commission not a flat rate. Might be wrong on that because I doubt he’ll find it.
Landfills are huge and a metal detector would be completely useless in this scenario. He has absolutely no idea where on the landfill it would be how deep down it would be or even if it’s definitely in there. Don’t a lot of places like this pull out anything that might be useful and sell them?
not to mention but he might not even have ever had the bitcoin to begin with and is just doing a fishing expedition for dump hard drives in hopes one does have bitcoin on it
My favourite part from this story covered on another site was
Howells says that if only the council had entertained his excavation requests, “Newport would look like Dubai.” Currently, it still looks like Newport.
Does he really think $500M would significantly change a city? As if the city would get any part of it, or that Dubai is something to desire…
For all the talks about freedom and “decentralised” utopia the crypto bro cults spew all the time, they are really just obsessed with making absurd amounts of money fast. Their only motivation is greed.
Can’t say I’m surprised some regard Dubai as a goal. They only see the rich man’s club, they don’t care about how the sausage is made.
Yes, he’s stupid.
Most likely he won’t find that treasure. Instead of wasting years of his life, and not the worst of them, he could be spending time with girls or working his ass off for some more certain value to spend as he sees fit.
He’s a crypto bro there’s no way he’s hanging out with any girls. Probably “nice guys” them into running away very fast, th n complains on the internet.
I remember hearing about this guy years ago. He probably is now devoting 10 (?) years of his life (I did not look it up) searching for his lost bitcoin, but I have got the feeling, that he will never find them.
But boy, if he does…
This is such a monkeys paw. You have a drive with $500 million USD of Bitcoin, but the drive is somewhere in the local landfill.
Such a curse, I can’t imagine the regret they feel every day getting up for work.
After 10 years though, isn’t it just gone/destroyed? Rain/corrosion would have destroyed the drive by now.
they bury it in dirty diapers and then they go over it with the crazy steamroller that has spikes on the wheel to make sure everything’s nice and flat
I don’t understand how you accidentally throw a drive away. I have a drawer full of old hard drives that I put in there because at some point I’m going to wipe the data off of them before disposing of them but then I never do and I just leave them in the drawer.
I don’t even think it would be legal for me to just throw it in general waste I’d have to take it to the actual depot.
It’s already corroded from the factory…hard drive platters use iron oxide. Can’t rust rust. The mechanical bits may be trashed but the platter can most likely still be read with specialized recovery equipment.
If he had kept his seed phrase for his wallet, he would be able to recover the funds to a new hard drive. This was very common advice if you did a little bit of research before purchasing btc. I can’t judge too much though as I ignored a dogecoin wallet when they were worthless but 500,000 doge suddenly felt less worthless once doge pushed past 5-10 cents, but by that time, my wallet was gone and I had lost my seed.
200k Doge, all gone, would have been a nice gift when it hit 50 cents…
Fun Doge tidbit, it gets criticized for having no limit to the supply (new ones keep getting added to the supply) but if Dogrcoins replaced US dollars less new dollars would be created every year than in the current system!
Id have had 100k if i sold at 20 cents. And that doesnt even factor in the thousands of doge i gambled away on pokershibes, a dogecoin poker site.
I have a friend in NY who lost a thumb drive with bitcoin on it in 2011. Every year or two he goes a little nuts and searches his entire apartment for it, but obviously has never found it. I think he threw it away and doesn’t remember, but the exercise of searching helps him exorcise the demons.
I put about 10% of my investment portfolio in bitcoin, personally. It’s way too volatile, at least for me, to go in big, but I can trust that every 3-4 years people are going to go insane buying it and the price will spike. If you’re already invested you can benefit.
I had a fraction of Bitcoin mined, not bought, in early years when you could do that on a desktop PC. It was so unimportant for me, that this is the first time I’ve remembered about this. I suppose it costs now enough to care, but I still don’t.
While
he goes a little nuts and searches his entire apartment for it, but obviously has never found it
happens to me with searching for childhood’s toys, old drawings, attempts at poetry. But not this.
10% of your portfolio is big.
I s’pose.
But compared to the silly geese who take an extra mortgage out to dump into crypto every time it hits an ATH, it’s nothing.
it’s already in pieces.
And if not, probably full of trash juice.
I’m so glad I’ve spent my 2 or 3 bitcoins back in the early years for some 60€ software…
This feels similar to cyberpunk “I’ve been a corporation once, kids” stories, and something about gold rush.
Still better odds than winning the lottery!
This is the type of “buried treasure” story that kids have these days.
I just imagine a movie like The Goonies but instead of talking about a cave full their treasure, they tell stories about the “flash drive full of gold” that’s buried somewhere in the deepest reaches of the garbage dump.
“This is our time! Down here, this is our time!”
What does “let him try and find the hard drive” really mean? Does he just want access to the landfill or is he expecting some kind of cooperation with the workers? How disruptive is he going to be?
Very disruptive. Landfills typically bury the day’s trash at the end of the day and it’s just layers and layers of garbage, like lasagna. You might be able to work on Monday’s trash slice, but by the time Thursday rolls around, it’s time to add a layer on top of Monday.
Digging could interrupt the entire landfill process if it’s still an active landfill, meaning the daily garbage has to be redirected elsewhere, because landfills aren’t just a hole in the ground, they are a feat of engineering.
I’m a simple man. I see Practical Engineering, I up vote.
Even if Howells was able to somehow find the drive, it’s been sitting in a landfill for more than a decade. Still, his team of experts believe there is about an 80 percent chance that data from the drive would be recoverable.
Is this copium?
500 million justifies using some very fancy data recovery means, as long as he’s sure it’s the right drive.
Its not like i am naive to economy but i cant help but see this:
Ape spends time and energy to convinces other apes to spend time, energy and resources, potentially sacrifice some of the environment and cause hinder to the local population. To dig for a metallic object discarded a decade ago so they can with some hope extract a codestring of information which will unlock some other strings of 0 and 1 that we then collectively agree on means this person has x many digital object which we all agree on has x economic value.
And if they succeed they will al smile because this is winning.
Here is sm either more radical/normal, depending on your perspective. Take the drive that has the wallet/or make it a physical one. Place it in a museum and name it “x Bitcoins”. Value recovered and nothing was lost.
Humans are weird.
You really don’t want to set precedent here. What if any random person starts having hallucinations about hard drives being lost in the trash. You don’t want anybody to have the right to dig up your landfill
I’m not seeing a negative here? As long as they accept liability why shouldn’t someone be able to dig through landfill?
the potential liability exceeds the value of what they’re searching for.
Air contamination, interruption of ongoing landfill operations, what if the landfills already capped? Do they get to reopen it? What contractors do you allow to do the work? Who takes the liability if they don’t fulfill the work to the specification? What if multiple people want to dig in the landfill at the same time? Who arbitrates? What’s the limit?
You’ll get payed when we find it!
Archive link: https://archive.ph/iKcYS
The new El Dorado.
Still, I’m not sure why the council are addressing their statements to “Whales Online”
Maybe more like the new Oak Island Money Pit.
In a statement to Whales Online
Ooooowwwaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh
