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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

#61

Post by buro9 »

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...

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.hounslow.gov.uk/spacewaye

You go along, separate your stuff into several different piles. Pay fees for things like fridges, CRTs, etc. Then you leave.

The thing is... I don't actually believe that electrical equipment is really recycled. Stuff like monitors may have the most toxic bits removed, but I strongly suspect that all other electrical equipment is just put into landfill as-is.

If the story is all true then the facility in question is this one: http://www.newport.gov.uk/_dc/index.cfm?fuseaction=wasterecy...

Which is advertised as a recycling centre.

Which means the guy has done all that he could to get it recycled, and that it's the authorities and government services themselves who are just dumping stuff in landfill even when it was delivered as recycling.

All that said... if it was recycled as advertised, then the chances of it still existing would be closer to zero than the current scenario.

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

#63

Post by akkartik »

kbutler wrote: post #50
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?

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 are total bastards towards the environment.

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

#64

Post by fryguy »

jballanc wrote: post #35
dmix wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Zimbabwe had hyper-inflation, which made currency worthless as soon as it was printed. Bitcoins have the opposite "problem".

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

#65

Post by brazzy »

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.

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?

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

#66

Post by ericb »

There are some people who believe a realistic value for bitcoin in the success scenario could be circa 1 million dollars (if it were to partially supplant gold or USD).

As a thought experiment, if I google for landfill prices, I see prices like 40 million dollars for a landfill. So if you can mine one hard drive in that scenario, landfills should be massively more valuable.

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

#67

Post by acomjean »

People throw away money all the time. I used to do landfill design. Summers were spent on sites doing inspections. My former boss tells the story someone came looking for trash from a specific location. They ask, did anyone see metal box? They went to look for it and couldn't find it. Asked what was in the box, the response was "Money, a lot of money..."

If you throw something away by mistake your only chance is to get to the landfill before the truck does and hope they'll dump in a separate area you can pick through.

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

#68

Post by citricsquid »

incision wrote: post #62

I have a 50 BTC wallet encrypted with a password I can't remember. Been meaning to figure out how to script something to run through variations on the type of password I would have used.

Talk to these guys, they're highly regarded in r/bitcoin and you can do it without compromising access to the coins: http://www.walletrecoveryservices.com/

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

#69

Post by akkartik »

buro9 wrote: post #61
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...

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…

Good points, thanks. That'll teach me to get worked up without looking at the sources.

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

#70

Post by DanBC »

hnha wrote: post #59
DanBC wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but you can say that about a whole bunch of start ups.
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