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Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site

theguardian.com

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Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site

#111

Post by tedunangst »

rcthompson wrote: post #91

So, this raises an interesting question for me. Since the total supply of Bitcoins is limited by design, doesn't every forgotten or lost Bitcoin reduce the total supply? In other words, suppose, hypothetically, that after all Bitcoins have been mined, I bought them all, stored them on a hard drive (with no backup, obviously), and then destroyed that hard drive (let's say I threw it into a black hole). Does Bitcoin st…

More plausible scenario: Bill Gates converts all his wealth to bitcoin, as will inevitably happen when bitcoin overtakes the dollar. He dies, but forgets to put his password in the will. oops.

Normally, if a rich person dies without a will (or without specifying their bank password), there are legal procedures for the heirs to fight it out in court and collect. With bitcoin, poof, it's gone.

Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site

#112

Post by milsorgen »

sdoering wrote: post #53
sliverstorm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laptop drives just aren't as useful as desktop drives (most towers can take 3-5 3.5" drives, most laptops can take exactly 1x 2.5"), and this particular platter was probably only 64-256GB?

Well, why not take a cheap case and have a nice, small, portable external.

That's what I did with my IDE drives. Just a cheap housing off newegg but the speed is lackluster and having my current computers recognize the device was spotty at best. Probably just the nature of a cheap device but even if it preformed adequately I have trouble deciding what to use it for when I have a plethora of SD cards laying about.

Probably scrap it for the magnets at some point. Those are much better than the fridge magnets you find at the store!

Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site

#113

Post by thaumasiotes »

akkartik wrote: post #63
kbutler wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

£4m penalty for discarding one hard drive is "not-unreasonable"? boggle You weren't on the Apple-Samsung or Newegg juries, were you?

1. I believe penalties for polluting our externalities should be greater, yes. As evidence I cite the fact that people keep polluting with existing penalties/enforcement. The tragedy of the commons is a very real thing. 2. I wasn't recommending that be the legal penalty. But if karma decides to be a bitch to this guy, hey I ain't complainin'. 3. I was exaggerating for effect. Seemed for a good cause: We human beings…

> I believe penalties for polluting our externalities [sic] should be greater, yes. As evidence I cite the fact that people keep polluting with existing penalties/enforcement.

This is a neat example of contemporary use of the externalities concept in political discourse. First, although the word appears in your statement like a totem, you're not using it correctly. Second, your second sentence doesn't support your first, unless you assume that the harm from polluting the environment is infinite. If we priced pollution perfectly for everyone, people would keep polluting because society would rather have some pollution and some products than no pollution and no products. Raising the cost of polluting will lower the amount of pollution, but there is no reason to expect that it will lower the amount of pollution to zero, and the position "keep raising the cost until the activity disappears" is grounded in religion, not economics. It requires you to assume that the harm of the taboo activity is so great that no amount could ever be desirable.

Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site

#114

Post by joggg »

batbomb wrote: post #45

Assuming there's not too much iron and steel in the land fill, it's might be possible he could find it with a sensitive enough magnetometer at 1 meter, maybe more so if you built a motor to move it around rapidly. I think the field strength at 1 meter might be something like 1 milliGauss, which should definitely be detectable. Walking the field and recording the magnetic fields might be possible, you'd at least know…

something about the platter in the HD being a magnetic medium...

Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site

#115

Post by rcthompson »

olalonde wrote: post #106
rcthompson wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what about my second question? If I bought all the Bitcoins and deleted them, does that destroy the currency entirely?

In practice, no because 1) New Bitcoins are created every 10 minutes until we reach ~21M bitcoins. 2) Some people will refuse to sell their Bitcoin to you. In theory, if you can wait until year ~2140, send all the Bitcoins in the world to your address and delete the private key from your hard drive (and brain), then yes. But then, maybe someone could get really lucky and guess your private key. But both those scenari…

Actually, the question immediately above that one, "Won't loss of wallets and the finite amount of Bitcoins create excessive deflation, destroying Bitcoin?", really gets to the heart of what I really wanted to understand. My phrasing was really meant as a "reduction to absurdity" kind of formulation, as in "what if all the Bitcoins were lost?"

Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site

#116

Post by nilved »

akkartik wrote: post #12

A not-unreasonable penalty for risking pollution of his ground water, especially since he probably did the same thing to electronics many times before. I can't believe nobody is talking about this. Illegal in many US states. http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...

I don't have anything to add to the conversation except for the fact that your comment made me literally laugh out loud at its absurdity and naivete. Thanks, I needed that.

Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site

#117

Post by InclinedPlane »

kaffeinecoma wrote: post #85
buro9 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual story was sourced entirely from this reddit post: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rilcj/as_a_person_... Which was sourced entirely from "someone in the IRC channel". Whether it's true or not is one thing, but if it is then the reddit source also says: > He went to the "recycling centre" and they showed him around. This makes some sense, I've 'recycled' before at places like this: http://www.houns…

The thing is... I don't actually believe that electrical equipment is really recycled I had something similar happen when I went to my local recycling center a year after moving into a new town. I had carefully squirreled away a pile of batteries (AA, AAA, D-cells, etc), old smoke detectors (which contain trace amounts of radioactive elements), and some unused cans of latex paint. Saved it all for the big trip to the…

Smoke detectors should be properly disposed of but alkaline batteries can be thrown away. Long ago ordinary batteries used to contain some amount of hazardous heavy metals but that's no longer the case.

Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site

#118

Post by pbreit »

akkartik wrote: post #12

A not-unreasonable penalty for risking pollution of his ground water, especially since he probably did the same thing to electronics many times before. I can't believe nobody is talking about this. Illegal in many US states. http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...

Give me a break. Who doesn't throw hard drives into the trash? And are you really so sure hard drives are included in any of the state e-waste laws? I doubt very many if any.

Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site

#119

Post by PeterisP »

tedunangst wrote: post #111
rcthompson wrote: post #91

So, this raises an interesting question for me. Since the total supply of Bitcoins is limited by design, doesn't every forgotten or lost Bitcoin reduce the total supply? In other words, suppose, hypothetically, that after all Bitcoins have been mined, I bought them all, stored them on a hard drive (with no backup, obviously), and then destroyed that hard drive (let's say I threw it into a black hole). Does Bitcoin st…

More plausible scenario: Bill Gates converts all his wealth to bitcoin, as will inevitably happen when bitcoin overtakes the dollar. He dies, but forgets to put his password in the will. oops. Normally, if a rich person dies without a will (or without specifying their bank password), there are legal procedures for the heirs to fight it out in court and collect. With bitcoin, poof, it's gone.

Well, just as if you buy a pile of gold, bury it someplace deep and obscure, and forget to tell your heirs where exactly it is.

You may happen to 'find' the bitcoin keys with some forensics, or it may never be found.

Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site

#120

Post by ep103 »

bafjohnson wrote: post #98

I have misplaced Bitcoins currently worth in excess of $700,000 / £430,000. They were purchased a couple of years back. I've not even started the search for them properly as I know how gutted I will feel if I definitely can't find them. At the end of the day, it's only money and there's always time to make more. Time is the one thing of which we have a finite amount!

If I lost 700,000$ of anything, I'm fairly certain I would quit work and devote myself to finding them. I mean, even if I spent a year doing it, that's a larger rate of potential return than anything I'll see in my lifetime.
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