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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

#41

Post by DanBC »

nitrogen wrote: post #31
MichaelApproved wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

electron microscope have really low odds of recovering anything useful.

At beast it's a speculative attack to be considered in a risk assessment, not a real attack anyone ever actually uses.

I'd welcome any information about people really using electron microscopes to get better than 63% per bit recovery.

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

#42

Post by sogen »

chuckd1356 wrote: post #20

Pardon my ignorance, but how do you prove a) He doesn't have a copy of the private key? b) He's telling the truth about mining them? c) Actually threw away the drive?

Agreed, sounds fishy and a great way to get exposure, The Guardian covering this pyramid scheme, and to get it into the mainstream...

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

#43

Post by simplemath »

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…

The current market cap is based on the notional value of all coins mined to date x current market value of 1 BTC. If there are actually 1 million BTC (0r 100k or whatever)missing, lost or otherwise irretrievable, then the price per bitcoin is notionally higher.

Of course, there's no way to ever prove some coins were lost or not so the point is moot.

In a roundabout way I agree with you, just not for the same reasons.

In effect the lost coins are already priced in, I just find the idea of lost BTC fascinating.

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

#44

Post by DanBC »

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!

A soccer / football pitch has an area of about 7140 square metres.

They say the drive could be "3 or 4 feet deep" - let's just call that one metre. So it's only 7140 cubic metres to search.

Admittedly, that's 7140 cubic metres of foul trash. It will include soiled babies diapers, rotting food, female sanitary products, tins, bottles, etc etc.

Assuming you could find the drive at a cost of one million. (roughly £140 per cubic metre) That'd give you 6 million to share between you and the council.

I guess you could add some environmental fixing thing in there (removing any electronics that are found, recycling any glass or metals vent methane, etc, and give them £2m, and keep the rest?

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

#45

Post by batbomb »

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 the range you needed. Secondly, any recent dated arial photos could maybe be used to determine a better approximation of depth, i.e. looking for a marker in the actual photo, then going to dig to find that marker, record the depth.

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

#46

Post by aric »

ed209 wrote: post #16
edubart wrote: post #13

He is not the only one, back in 2010 I did mine 160 BTC, however at some point I stopped caring. Months later I had to format hard disk because ArchLinux did a great job breaking the whole system with an update, in the moment I just didn't remember that there were a BitCoin wallet in my system. Damn ArchLinux. Although I didn't lose much as him. Now I kinda feel relieved knowing his mistake, he lost much more than me…

When bitcoins are lost, are they lost forever? So the total pool of bitcoins will be 21m - your 160 and his 7000?

No. They are still there, accounted to that address in the blockchain. In the rare event that someone discovers the private key used to derive that address: happy days. In the near term, practically speaking, you can negate them from circulation. It's a very low probability that it'll be spent.

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

#47

Post by Jtsummers »

tux wrote: post #27

It amazes me how people keep loosing money O_o Even if it only worth $1,000 why would you ever put it in the bin ? What a waste =(

It's essentially the same as throwing out holiday or birthday cards with a cash gift inside (if it's a check it could be recoverable by contacting the sender). Shit happens and people forget about things.

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

#48

Post by ams6110 »

There's a fair chance the drive is unreadable. Exposed to the elements, and when trash is put in a landfill it's not just dumped, it's mixed with earth and pushed around with bulldozers. I would not be surprised if it has been crushed.

But who knows?

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

#49

Post by abrichr »

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…

He could just buy 100 hard drives, install GPS locators in them, and then throw them out once a week. Then he could calculate the probability that the original drive still exists based on how many of the new ones survive. He might even be able to infer something about its location.

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

#50

Post by kbutler »

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...

£4m penalty for discarding one hard drive is "not-unreasonable"?

boggle

You weren't on the Apple-Samsung or Newegg juries, were you?

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