🎵Money for nothing and checks for free🎶
bitcoin is just gambling and yall dropped your lotto ticket.
Chicks, not checks, btw.
Two checks at the same time, man.
Yortuk and Georg? You cruise correctly.
For $5M you can have all the chicks that you want… I joke that my wife keeps me in check and I keep her in cash.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/iKcYS
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?
I mean, as long as they are willing to pay all the costs of digging up a landfill up front… Why not?
This article looks like someone “wrote” it using speech-to-text and didn’t double-check their work.
tossing a hard driving
the whole thing could be for not (instead of “the whole thing could be for naught.”)
and of course,
In a statement to Whales Online
Of course, if it turns out that whales have banded together to make their own website, I’ll stand corrected.
Well this guy would have been a whale if he’d backed up his keys.
Pretty sure he would still be a man, no matter how many keys he made.
This article is about a marine mammal. For other uses, see Whale (disambiguation).
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
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.
Still better odds than winning the lottery!
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.
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 had a hard drive with five Bitcoin. Gave the old Gateway PC to a felon buddy who was down bad and trying to rebuild his life learning some coding way back in the mid 2010’s.
He threw the computer away for a new one. At the time it was 10,000 bitcoin for a pizza so never cared. I chuckle about it now, but it’s gone forever.
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. Obviously 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.
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.
Who could you even trust to send the drive to? Anyone who could read it could take the money and just claim it couldn’t be recovered.
I mean, companies exist specifically to do this for other big companies, I’m sure there are security procedures, background checks, NDAs and everything that needs to go with that.
Data recovery specialists exist, and nobody would pay for them if the data they were recovering wasn’t, you know, valuable enough to pay a specialist to maybe retrieve it. They probably deal with multimillion dollar industrial/financial/business secrets all the time, and do it discreetly, or else their business wouldn’t even exist.
The thing is, if he had access to his hard drive at any point in the last 10 years or so he would have sold his Bitcoin long before it was this valuable, like many, many other people who used to own Bitcoin and aren’t currently millionaires. The fact that he lost his hard drive is the only reason it’s actually worth anything.
That’s a really good point. So many of my friends who used silk road would be multimillionaires if they didn’t spend the btc.
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, they get criticized for having no limit to the supply (new ones keep getting added to the supply) but if they 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.
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…
I’ve heard about this dude since like…2018. At some point you have to move on. Shit like that will consume you, and it’s just not worth losing years of your life over it. Talk about a needle in a haystack.
It’s 500M though…
Well, it was. 11 years of landfill leachate have probably taken their toll, not to mention that it was probably crushed immediately under literal tons of soggy rainwater trash.
Life with friends and family is much more valuable than some extra 000s. Money can’t bring them back once they are gone. Nor can it be taken to the next life.
Okay, I see that. But it’s 500m tough…
Okay, there’s no chance he’s getting it back though…
Okay, but it’s 500m though…
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.
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!”
All this time he could’ve thought up another magnificent way to make money but he chose to stay in the past, longing for something probably already completely degraded, destroyed or recycled, even if it’s 500M…
How would you make 500m if you’d already beaten the house once?
How much egg is gonna be on his face when he finds it one day behind a cabinet drawer?
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’ll get payed when we find it!
Sometimes you can find scimitars in there. You can chop a camel right in its hump and drink all of its milk right off the tip of those things.
You throwing babies away?
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
It depends on the sorting process. I don’t know much about his situation. If the hard drive got thrown into the trash, then it is most likely in a plastic bag somewhere buried. However, if it went through some kind of electronic recycling program then it was probably stripped for metals and parts.
IMO, if the dude wants to walk around the dump for the rest of his life trying to find his $500 million treasure chest then let him. The only problem with that is, how many other people are going to want to find things in the dump? Are we just going to allow people to wander through the dump now?? Perhaps instead of suing, he should just find someone willing to front the money to buy the entire dump. Haha.
There is some method to the madness of dumping, trucks are not allowed to drive around and find a spot. Trash deposits get cycled to keep the dump somewhat level. It’s a “fill up Sect 12A, then fill up 78C” type of deal.
It’s not parceled like land, no where close to being exact. If the paper records go back that far and are intact, it would be a “Check out Sect 91B…maybe 10 to 100 feet down. Good luck”
Technicians that will probably demand a commission not a flat rate.
Never heard of anyone in that field doing this. If you walk into a computer repair place and say you need to recover data off a hard drive and they say they need to know how much the data’s worth before they can tell you the cost, you should probably just immediately walk out and go to a different store regardless because that’s probably a skeezy place.
