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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

#31

Post by nitrogen »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #7
warbastard wrote: post #4

Seeing as he has a good idea of when it was thrown away surely that narrows down where it could be quite considerably. He just needs someone to invest some money in finding it with him for a share of the wealth. I wouldn't have given up if I were him.

That's assuming the data will still be intact when the drive is recovered. Edit: I'd guess the odds of the data still being intact are close to zero. A drive is so fragile I doubt it survived. Consider it being thrown around in a garbage truck and then slowly buried under several feet of other trash. Several inches of trash at a time, over time, with trucks rolling over the area each time. Then, consider the weather…

For millions of pounds, it might be worth using an electron microscope to try to pull the bits off if the platters can be recovered.

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

#32

Post by kintamanimatt »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #7
warbastard wrote: post #4

Seeing as he has a good idea of when it was thrown away surely that narrows down where it could be quite considerably. He just needs someone to invest some money in finding it with him for a share of the wealth. I wouldn't have given up if I were him.

That's assuming the data will still be intact when the drive is recovered. Edit: I'd guess the odds of the data still being intact are close to zero. A drive is so fragile I doubt it survived. Consider it being thrown around in a garbage truck and then slowly buried under several feet of other trash. Several inches of trash at a time, over time, with trucks rolling over the area each time. Then, consider the weather…

Hard drives are fairly robust when unpowered and can take quite heavy shocks and still be fine. The drive itself might be fucked but so long as the platters are in one piece there's a decent hope a good data recovery co could retrieve the data. The danger is it got bent or crushed, and that'd be what I'd guess has happened.

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

#33

Post by sliverstorm »

vinhboy wrote: post #11

Forget the bitcoins, why would you throw away a perfectly good, supposedly working, hard drive? That's a shame. And before secure formatting it?

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?

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

#34

Post by kamjam »

judk wrote: post #6
topynate wrote: post #3

The attitude of Newport council - everyone, really - seems pretty nuts to me. $7 million is about 185 kilos of gold. Imagine what would happen if someone lost that in a rubbish tip!

200kg of gold is of course easier to trawl out of a pile than one (possibly destroyed) hard drive is. Look forward to treasure hunters attacking the site though. Bitcoin disks may be the future of buried treasure.

I wonder how many hard drives are retrieved and then somehow rescued - which may no longer power up so expert help to recover data off the platters is required. Rinse. Repeat.

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

#35

Post by jballanc »

dmix wrote: post #10
simplemath wrote: post #8

People keep saying 21 million bitcoins. There are a significant percentage lost forever.

Why does every bitcoin comment thread have this conversation? It doesn't matter if a tiny percentage of the currency does not exist in the marketplace or gets lost. 21 million / 0.00000001 = how many bitcoins can "exist". So considering that there's no real blocking factors in how many bitcoins can be distributed, why does it matter if some get lost? The value of the coins are hardly affected now that such a high lev…

Ask the Zimbabweans about the insignificance of 14 zeros in your currency. History is littered with far more examples of currency revaluation than long-term stable measures of wealth (in fact precious metals are, possibly, the only example).

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

#36

Post by erikig »

yafujifide wrote: post #5

Another way to mine for bitcoin.

My favorite quote from the article:

"Howells stopped mining after a week because his girlfriend complained that the laptop was getting too noisy and hot while it ran the programs to solve the complex mathematical problems needed to create new Bitcoins."

He should definitely have found another way...

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

#38

Post by JanezStupar »

Well if Bitcoin really takes off, then someday it might be wise to go buy the landfill and go search for the "Treasure of Newport".

I could imagine the headline: "Retired computer tech regrets telling everyone of the Bitcoin treasure trove".

Talk about bad financial decisions.

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

#40

Post by Jtsummers »

dmix wrote: post #28
Jtsummers wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The divisibility of the currency doesn't matter for this calculation. Currency represents wealth. There is a finite amount of BTC that will ever be available. Any BTC that is locked away like this means there is less BTC to represent the same amount of wealth (actually, it's a growing amount of wealth presently). This means the value (or potential value) of each BTC has gone up.

> This means the value (or potential value) of each BTC has gone up. By an ever decreasing significancy as the market cap expands and BTC of value are held onto with care.

I think there may be some confusion on my part in understanding your point. To the second part, BTC loss will hopefully decrease. If loss/theft continues it's represents a significant UX issue that will inhibit the growth of bitcoin.

To your first part, why would 1 BTC lost when it's worth $1000 have a greater significance than 1 BTC lost when it's worth $1,000,000?

EDIT: Unless you mean any individual wallet's share of BTC is likely to be less, in which case the odds of losing as much BTC in a single incident is significantly reduced.

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