Howells ran a program on his laptop for a week to generate his stash CPU based bitcoin mining, probably solo without a pool, 7000+ coins. Ha. Those were the days.
Something about hindsight being 20/20.....
Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site
51–60 of 125 posts
Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
What incentive would he have to lie about any of this?
He's already set up a wallet to receive donations. Imaginary internet points. Exposure.
Collecting the donations changes everything. It seems like going to "the internet" with a sob story and a paypal account (or bitcoin wallet in this case) has been getting pretty popular recently, or at least has been getting more attention.
I absolutely cannot understand why anybody would ever throw money at some unverified sob story...
Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site
#53Forget 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?
Well, why not take a cheap case and have a nice, small, portable external.
Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site
#54Well 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.
On the other hand, lying that there's £4M buried under a pile of rubbish would be highly entertaining.
Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site
#55Earlier 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.
Yeah, you could do that. But not everyone needs an external (I've got one I haven't powered up in at least two years) and considering externals are rarely backed up (heck often they ARE the backup) I don't know that I'd be jumping to have a played-out system drive as my external.
Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site
#56Forget the bitcoins, why would you throw away a perfectly good, supposedly working, hard drive? That's a shame. And before secure formatting it?
Most people just throw away their laptops when it breaks for whatever reason.
Even if the HD was ok, they won't even bother opening it up.
Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site
#57A 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?
£4m in bitcoin today might just be £40 tomorrow
Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site
#58He 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?
I'm pretty confident that in the future it will be possible to break abandoned wallets.
Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site
#59The 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 p…
Would you be willing to bet that it would still be worth as much when you find it? It's not gold, it's bitcoins.
This sounds like it would be an incredibly unwise and risky investment, even if you pretend that you will definitely find the hdd.
Re: Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site
#60The 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 p…
The problem: even if you find the derive after spending all that money, there is a very good chance it is completely unreadable after spending months in a landfill.