Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by idupree » Thu, Nov 28, 2013, 5:08 AM UTC

brazzy wrote: post #65

sdoering wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because for the price of the case you can get a flash drive with similar capacity than a 5 year old laptop drive, and much nicer, smaller and more portable?

I can get a good USB2 enclosure for $10-15. My 6.5 year old laptop hard drive is 120GB (and couldn't read/write data via SATA much faster than it can via USB2 anyway).

A 128GB flash drive costs around 5 times as much as that enclosure. Yes, it's better, but it's quite more expensive. A more comparably priced 32GB flash drive stores several times less data (which might matter to you) and may have write speed that can't even saturate USB2 (ditto; I installed Fedora on a 16GB flash drive that has max 3MB/s write speed and it takes amusingly long to install updates, though its read speed is decent and doesn't suffer seek time).

Flash drives will get cheaper, but the meaning of "5 years ago" will change just as quickly (given current trends).

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

#122

Post by Houshalter » Thu, Nov 28, 2013, 10:56 AM UTC

muxxa wrote: post #102

MAGZine wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The lost currency is essentially removed from the pool. The result is deflation--because there is less supply, the currency is worth more. Goods cost the same, so the bitcoin value for a certain product/service drops. At least this is what economics would seem to dictate. You can send tiny partitions of bitcoin, so it's really easy to send a millionth of a bitcoin, where if $40t disappeared from the USD, you can…

What if the situation continues and large percentages of the bitcoin pool are of unknown status (could be lost, could be in the possession of a government institution, could be being hoarded). Would this make bitcoin more risky compared to a hypothetical competing crypto currency that can account for the status of all of it's coins? Could this make bitcoin untenable?

Possibly though you would have to obtain a large amount of bitcoins and then just sit on them for a long time to have any affect. And I doubt it would make money since the price would go down if you put them back on the market.

The equivalent situation in the real world would be if someone secretly bought half the world's oil supply and then hid it, or at least just sat on it. The price goes up since there is now less oil available.

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

#123

Post by Aldo_MX » Thu, Nov 28, 2013, 6:42 PM UTC

tlrobinson wrote: post #76

Aldo_MX wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty confident that in the future it will be possible to break abandoned wallets.

Break wallets encrypted with a passphrase, or crack private keys? The former is possible for weak passphrases, but if the latter is ever possible that's a Very Bad Thing for Bitcoin. It may happen eventually, but hopefully we will have migrated to stronger crypto by then. I do wonder what will happen to abandoned coins at that point. Will they become invalid after a migration period, or will they be up for grabs to t…

I meant to crack private keys, it will eventually become viable to spend resources researching/developing an attack vector to break those abandoned wallets. Migration to better cryptos will certainly happen, but remember that the lost wallets won't be upgraded, because they're, well, lost.

Making them invalid would be self-defeating to bitcoin, but it's not bitcoin's fault that some day abandoned wallets will become breakable, there will never be an everlasting bullet-proof encryption, and my point is: It won't happen tomorrow, it may take tens or hundreds of years, but it will certainly happen.

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

#124

Post by tedunangst » Thu, Nov 28, 2013, 9:42 PM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #119

tedunangst wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed. I wouldn't recommend Bill Gates keep all his wealth in gold, either.

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

#125

Post by tlrobinson » Thu, Nov 28, 2013, 9:44 PM UTC

Aldo_MX wrote: post #123

tlrobinson wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Break wallets encrypted with a passphrase, or crack private keys? The former is possible for weak passphrases, but if the latter is ever possible that's a Very Bad Thing for Bitcoin. It may happen eventually, but hopefully we will have migrated to stronger crypto by then. I do wonder what will happen to abandoned coins at that point. Will they become invalid after a migration period, or will they be up for grabs to t…

I meant to crack private keys, it will eventually become viable to spend resources researching/developing an attack vector to break those abandoned wallets. Migration to better cryptos will certainly happen, but remember that the lost wallets won't be upgraded, because they're, well, lost. Making them invalid would be self-defeating to bitcoin, but it's not bitcoin's fault that some day abandoned wallets will become…

Agreed, though I'm not sure Bitcoin's users/miners wouldn't "vote" to eventually invalidate unmigrated wallets. There's a tradeoff between accidentally destroying someone's legitimate wealth (e.x. a nLockTime'd transaction left as an inheritance) vs allowing crackers to eventually claim potentially enormous abandoned wallets (worth billions, if not trillions of dollars in the future). But remember those unmigrated wallets would also be equally vulnerable to cracking as abandoned wallets.

Perhaps there could be a solution whereby a nLockTime'd transactions could be presented during the migration period. I haven't thought through the details.

Either way, treasure hunting in the future will almost certainly be of the digital variety.