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This article is about someone who threw away the hard drive containing his wallet file/keys, the only copy he had of it. His wallet would be worth $500M. He wan

This article is about someone who threw away the hard drive containing his wallet file/keys, the only copy he had of it. His wallet would be worth $500M. He wants to excavate the garbage dump to find it. I'm just wondering what that would look like. It seems a Sisyphean task at best, like seeking a needle in a haystack. And how do you make sure you don't accidentally damage a hard drive with an excavator? What makes him think the hard drive is not already damaged because it has been driven over or just the weight of garbage crushing it? What if his hard drive went through one of those conveyor belts with a giant magnet above it to separate metals? I'm not an expert, but if you take the cost of the excavation project (not just excavation, but also sifting!), then multiply it by the chance of success, it feels like the expected value is less than the wallet. It's interesting to think about though. You can easily throw away a pile of cash, but never half a billion. The volume would be too big, you would notice. But a bitcoin wallet of the same street value fits on a micro SD, it could literally fall through a hole in your pocket.

CPLX 5y ago
It would be trivially easy to throw away half a billion dollars like this. All you'd have to do is have a winning ticket for a $500MM lottery jackpot in your pocket and put it through the laundry. Crypto is gambling. People have done it for millennia. You invent some system and some arbitrary rules about what’s valuable (the right domino, an ace of hearts, a jpeg of a monkey, a beanie baby) and then some people win some money and some people lose. This guy won, and then he lost. Oh well. Just like with the lost lottery ticket no enterprise of actual value has been created or destroyed by this misfortune.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "Crypto is gambling" Bitcoin is 14 years old now, it's time to get used to it. There are people who hold who were born after it was invented. Its older than some financial instruments. I am not arguing it will be successfull or that its good, but it is definately proven beyong gambling
  - chinathrow 5y ago
    > but it is definately proven beyong gambling Not following here - how and where was this proven?
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    The lottery is more than 14 years old now, it’s time to get used to it. There are people with tickets who were born after it was invented. It’s older than some financial instruments. I am not arguing it will be successfull or that its good, but it is definately proven beyond gambling.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Bitcoin is 14 years old now, it's time to get used to it. [...] Its older than some financial instruments. I am not arguing it will be successfull or that its good, but it is definately proven beyong gambling No, it hasn't. Being around for more than 14 years doesn't prove something is anything more than gambling. Slot machines have been around almost 10 times as long as Bitcoin, and sticking money into them is still gambling.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      Let's go step by step: Gambling is putting down money in a game of chance, that is divorced from physical reality. It contributes nothing to the real economy, horse races do not provide any goods or services. Like horse racing or slot machines. If the US economy collapses, slot machine works the same way. Value of Bitcoin is providing a real service that functions, payments. Etherium provides computation and used to power crypto-kitties, etc. It was operating for 14 years and it's security functionality is proven. You might think it's function is crap, but that's a separate argument. If Visa and Mastercard collapse tomorrow, that would have a dramatic effect on the value of crypto. If a major government adopts it as a national currency, that would have an effect to. Therefore it is very much like investing in a startup. Now, the individual people investing into it might have no idea how it works, but how is this different from idiots and speculators among retail investors - Elon Musk tweets about Signal, and value of Signal Advance, a totally unrelated company, goes up 1,100%? That's not gambling but bitcoin is? I am certain that most of the folks here calling it gambling are not objectively sceptical, they are very salty. I have accepted things for what they are, I mined my first two bitcoins, spent them on beer at a funky pub in Prague when it was worth $50, and never touched it again. People in the community ranged from anarchists to bankers, and they were more passionate about their work than any startup founders I've seen. I am not envious of them and I don't call them names, I appreciate that they've introduced something completely new to the world even if the outcome is a bit questionable. NFTs on the other hand seem to have no merit behind them whatsoever, or at least so far I could not see it.
- jkepler 5y ago
  Figures someone would mention laundering money.
- toolz 5y ago
  Yes crypto is gambling. So is fiat. This seems to be where people get confused. They think just because everything is priced in fiat that fiat somehow is immune from value swings. Which it's really weird that people believe that given how much the price of things priced in USD changes so much. Literally everything is a gamble - there's no such thing as a risk-less vehicle for maintaining your wealth. Maybe something like bitcoin is more volatile than USD today, but that is not guaranteed to hold in the future. Crypto is superior to fiat in every property of money other than stability, but with global adoption of bitcoin I suspect even that property will be more satisfied by crypto in the not-so-distant future.
  - CPLX 5y ago
    The word gambling has a meaning. People don't procure fiat currency primarily in order to profit from its change in value. They use it to engage in trading of goods and services. People do primarily procure crypto primarily in order to profit from its change in value. The fact that each can (sort of) be used for the other purpose in limited cases doesn't invalidate that. > Crypto is superior to fiat in every property of money other than stability It's not. It's vastly inferior for the purpose of trading value for goods and services.
    - toolz 5y ago
      > The word gambling has a meaning. I'm aware of that and I'm aware of the meaning. Which is why I used the word. > People don't procure fiat currency primarily in order to profit from its change in value. They use it to engage in trading of goods and services. This is exactly the definition of procuring something to use it to increase their own value. When someone receives a good or service they value that good or service higher than the fiat they are holding which is exactly the gamble they're taking by procuring the fiat. > It's not. It's vastly inferior for the purpose of trading value for goods and services. I guess I could say "no you're wrong" too, but that's not a fruitful argument crypto is more fungible than fiat (fiat isn't global and doesn't have global access to exchanging for other fiats, even) crypto is more durable, fiat is easily destroyed crypto is more portable, I can take literally billions of USD worth of crypto across borders and spend every single penny of it instantly. You couldn't even begin to hope to have that kind of portability of fiat. crypto as a category is much more recognizable - there are _many_ different services that will guarantee the authenticity of a bitcoin transfer, while the fiat you're being paid in may very well be counterfeit. finaly the property of stability - fiat wins here, for now.
i_like_waiting 5y ago
>It's interesting to think about though. You can easily throw away a pile of cash, but never half a billion. The volume would be too big, you would notice. But a bitcoin wallet of the same street value fits on a micro SD, it could literally fall through a hole in your pocket. It's not exactly same thing, as you obviously won't lose something like that if you already realise its value. It's more along the lines of throwing out painting from your neighbor and he becomes world best paid artist in 5 years. Still interesting and scary to think that individual can basically "destroy" irreversibly any amount of savings by forgetting the keys/ sending it to wrong address and that can be done with 1 click.
- bruce343434 5y ago
  Right, it wasn't exactly an analogy. But I think it's still somewhat scary how easy it is to accidentally lose as well.
  - plebianRube 5y ago
    To be fair, he threw it away precisely because it didn't have much value. It's more analogous to throwing out some of your amazon share certificates in 1997.
    - astoor 5y ago
      The thing is, if you lost your share certificate, but could still prove to the registrar that you were the legitimate owner of those shares, there's a good chance you would get them back. Likewise, if you accidentally burned a bunch of banknotes, but had sufficient fragments remaining to prove your ownership, your central bank is likely to be able to recompense you. That's one of the consumer-friendly features of centralised systems, which is considered a bug in consumer-hostile decentralised systems.
      - plebianRube 5y ago
        >could still prove to the registrar Sure and if he had a multisig wallet he would still have his coins. The equivalency is that he did none of these things.
corobo 5y ago
> And how do you make sure you don't accidentally damage a hard drive with an excavator? What makes him think the hard drive is not already damaged because it has been driven over or just the weight of garbage crushing it? What if his hard drive went through one of those conveyor belts with a giant magnet above it to separate metals? Money until proven otherwise. Never underestimate the power of money on a person haha. Plenty of people out there that would eat a fair share of the excavated crap for a potential 500 milly never mind sift through it If he's smart he'll spin the attention into something with actual value than try to actually excavate a landfill
FDSGSG 5y ago
>I'm just wondering what that would look like. It seems a Sisyphean task at best, like seeking a needle in a haystack. And how do you make sure you don't accidentally damage a hard drive with an excavator? What makes him think the hard drive is not already damaged because it has been driven over or just the weight of garbage crushing it? What if his hard drive went through one of those conveyor belts with a giant magnet above it to separate metals? Sorting out all the hard drives within the proposed quantities of trash seems well within the realm of what's possible with modern waste sorting robots. Hard drives are really sturdy, it's unlikely that the data would be unrecoverable if you were able to identify the correct hard drive remains.
- dmurray 5y ago
  Yeah, I think you could do this project for tens of millions and have a 20% chance of finding it intact, and you could argue those numbers are conservative. All assuming everything is as described in the article. Here's an account [0] of a single diamond mine that processes 60,000 tons of material every day, of which 10,000 tons is ore that needs to be examined closely enough to find diamonds. The article talks about excavating a 250m x 250m x 15m volume, approximately 1 million tons. Even if all of that is potential "ore" - which I doubt - that's a hundred days for the diamond mine. The diamond miners have different economies of scale and different environmental concerns, but I think it's a good starting point. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/diamond-mine-siberia-russia-alrosa-photos?r=US&IR=T#each-excavator-bucket-holds-about-30-tonnes-more-than-66000-pounds-of-soil-or-ore-19 https://www.businessinsider.com/diamond-mine-siberia-russia-...
killtimeatwork 5y ago
Let's not forget the human factor. Presumably, an operation of this scale would require hiring help - potentially lots of it. How do you make sure that one of the workers does not just leave with the hard drive? It would require security on the level employed in gemstones mines (personal search for every employee who leaves the premises etc.) Kind of hard to set up in a bulletproof way - the potential finder could just let the relevant security people in on the profits.
- FatalLogic 5y ago
  Offer a percentage of the proceeds to the finder's team. Rationally then, they would be satisfied to give the drive to their employers, because their employers are more likely (than anyone else they'd be able to find) to recover the data from a drive that is badly damaged, and to pay them a generous bonus, as agreed. It also incentivizes the workers to keep an eye on each other to prevent the drive being smuggled out of the site.
em3rgent0rdr 5y ago
"But a bitcoin wallet of the same street value fits on a micro SD, it could literally fall through a hole in your pocket." But you can make any number of copies of the wallet.
YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
I guess Ross Hannaman still hasn't found that thumbdrive.

CPLX 5y ago

It would be trivially easy to throw away half a billion dollars like this. All you'd have to do is have a winning ticket for a $500MM lottery jackpot in your pocket and put it through the laundry. Crypto is gambling. People have done it for millennia. You invent some system and some arbitrary rules about what’s valuable (the right domino, an ace of hearts, a jpeg of a monkey, a beanie baby) and then some people win some money and some people lose. This guy won, and then he lost. Oh well. Just like with the lost lottery ticket no enterprise of actual value has been created or destroyed by this misfortune.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"Crypto is gambling" Bitcoin is 14 years old now, it's time to get used to it. There are people who hold who were born after it was invented. Its older than some financial instruments. I am not arguing it will be successfull or that its good, but it is definately proven beyong gambling
- chinathrow 5y ago
  > but it is definately proven beyong gambling Not following here - how and where was this proven?
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  The lottery is more than 14 years old now, it’s time to get used to it. There are people with tickets who were born after it was invented. It’s older than some financial instruments. I am not arguing it will be successfull or that its good, but it is definately proven beyond gambling.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Bitcoin is 14 years old now, it's time to get used to it. [...] Its older than some financial instruments. I am not arguing it will be successfull or that its good, but it is definately proven beyong gambling No, it hasn't. Being around for more than 14 years doesn't prove something is anything more than gambling. Slot machines have been around almost 10 times as long as Bitcoin, and sticking money into them is still gambling.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Let's go step by step: Gambling is putting down money in a game of chance, that is divorced from physical reality. It contributes nothing to the real economy, horse races do not provide any goods or services. Like horse racing or slot machines. If the US economy collapses, slot machine works the same way. Value of Bitcoin is providing a real service that functions, payments. Etherium provides computation and used to power crypto-kitties, etc. It was operating for 14 years and it's security functionality is proven. You might think it's function is crap, but that's a separate argument. If Visa and Mastercard collapse tomorrow, that would have a dramatic effect on the value of crypto. If a major government adopts it as a national currency, that would have an effect to. Therefore it is very much like investing in a startup. Now, the individual people investing into it might have no idea how it works, but how is this different from idiots and speculators among retail investors - Elon Musk tweets about Signal, and value of Signal Advance, a totally unrelated company, goes up 1,100%? That's not gambling but bitcoin is? I am certain that most of the folks here calling it gambling are not objectively sceptical, they are very salty. I have accepted things for what they are, I mined my first two bitcoins, spent them on beer at a funky pub in Prague when it was worth $50, and never touched it again. People in the community ranged from anarchists to bankers, and they were more passionate about their work than any startup founders I've seen. I am not envious of them and I don't call them names, I appreciate that they've introduced something completely new to the world even if the outcome is a bit questionable. NFTs on the other hand seem to have no merit behind them whatsoever, or at least so far I could not see it.
jkepler 5y ago
Figures someone would mention laundering money.
toolz 5y ago
Yes crypto is gambling. So is fiat. This seems to be where people get confused. They think just because everything is priced in fiat that fiat somehow is immune from value swings. Which it's really weird that people believe that given how much the price of things priced in USD changes so much. Literally everything is a gamble - there's no such thing as a risk-less vehicle for maintaining your wealth. Maybe something like bitcoin is more volatile than USD today, but that is not guaranteed to hold in the future. Crypto is superior to fiat in every property of money other than stability, but with global adoption of bitcoin I suspect even that property will be more satisfied by crypto in the not-so-distant future.
- CPLX 5y ago
  The word gambling has a meaning. People don't procure fiat currency primarily in order to profit from its change in value. They use it to engage in trading of goods and services. People do primarily procure crypto primarily in order to profit from its change in value. The fact that each can (sort of) be used for the other purpose in limited cases doesn't invalidate that. > Crypto is superior to fiat in every property of money other than stability It's not. It's vastly inferior for the purpose of trading value for goods and services.
  - toolz 5y ago
    > The word gambling has a meaning. I'm aware of that and I'm aware of the meaning. Which is why I used the word. > People don't procure fiat currency primarily in order to profit from its change in value. They use it to engage in trading of goods and services. This is exactly the definition of procuring something to use it to increase their own value. When someone receives a good or service they value that good or service higher than the fiat they are holding which is exactly the gamble they're taking by procuring the fiat. > It's not. It's vastly inferior for the purpose of trading value for goods and services. I guess I could say "no you're wrong" too, but that's not a fruitful argument crypto is more fungible than fiat (fiat isn't global and doesn't have global access to exchanging for other fiats, even) crypto is more durable, fiat is easily destroyed crypto is more portable, I can take literally billions of USD worth of crypto across borders and spend every single penny of it instantly. You couldn't even begin to hope to have that kind of portability of fiat. crypto as a category is much more recognizable - there are _many_ different services that will guarantee the authenticity of a bitcoin transfer, while the fiat you're being paid in may very well be counterfeit. finaly the property of stability - fiat wins here, for now.

i_like_waiting 5y ago

>It's interesting to think about though. You can easily throw away a pile of cash, but never half a billion. The volume would be too big, you would notice. But a bitcoin wallet of the same street value fits on a micro SD, it could literally fall through a hole in your pocket. It's not exactly same thing, as you obviously won't lose something like that if you already realise its value. It's more along the lines of throwing out painting from your neighbor and he becomes world best paid artist in 5 years. Still interesting and scary to think that individual can basically "destroy" irreversibly any amount of savings by forgetting the keys/ sending it to wrong address and that can be done with 1 click.

bruce343434 5y ago
Right, it wasn't exactly an analogy. But I think it's still somewhat scary how easy it is to accidentally lose as well.
- plebianRube 5y ago
  To be fair, he threw it away precisely because it didn't have much value. It's more analogous to throwing out some of your amazon share certificates in 1997.
  - astoor 5y ago
    The thing is, if you lost your share certificate, but could still prove to the registrar that you were the legitimate owner of those shares, there's a good chance you would get them back. Likewise, if you accidentally burned a bunch of banknotes, but had sufficient fragments remaining to prove your ownership, your central bank is likely to be able to recompense you. That's one of the consumer-friendly features of centralised systems, which is considered a bug in consumer-hostile decentralised systems.
    - plebianRube 5y ago
      >could still prove to the registrar Sure and if he had a multisig wallet he would still have his coins. The equivalency is that he did none of these things.

corobo 5y ago

> And how do you make sure you don't accidentally damage a hard drive with an excavator? What makes him think the hard drive is not already damaged because it has been driven over or just the weight of garbage crushing it? What if his hard drive went through one of those conveyor belts with a giant magnet above it to separate metals? Money until proven otherwise. Never underestimate the power of money on a person haha. Plenty of people out there that would eat a fair share of the excavated crap for a potential 500 milly never mind sift through it If he's smart he'll spin the attention into something with actual value than try to actually excavate a landfill

FDSGSG 5y ago

>I'm just wondering what that would look like. It seems a Sisyphean task at best, like seeking a needle in a haystack. And how do you make sure you don't accidentally damage a hard drive with an excavator? What makes him think the hard drive is not already damaged because it has been driven over or just the weight of garbage crushing it? What if his hard drive went through one of those conveyor belts with a giant magnet above it to separate metals? Sorting out all the hard drives within the proposed quantities of trash seems well within the realm of what's possible with modern waste sorting robots. Hard drives are really sturdy, it's unlikely that the data would be unrecoverable if you were able to identify the correct hard drive remains.

dmurray 5y ago
Yeah, I think you could do this project for tens of millions and have a 20% chance of finding it intact, and you could argue those numbers are conservative. All assuming everything is as described in the article. Here's an account [0] of a single diamond mine that processes 60,000 tons of material every day, of which 10,000 tons is ore that needs to be examined closely enough to find diamonds. The article talks about excavating a 250m x 250m x 15m volume, approximately 1 million tons. Even if all of that is potential "ore" - which I doubt - that's a hundred days for the diamond mine. The diamond miners have different economies of scale and different environmental concerns, but I think it's a good starting point. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/diamond-mine-siberia-russia-alrosa-photos?r=US&IR=T#each-excavator-bucket-holds-about-30-tonnes-more-than-66000-pounds-of-soil-or-ore-19 https://www.businessinsider.com/diamond-mine-siberia-russia-...

killtimeatwork 5y ago

Let's not forget the human factor. Presumably, an operation of this scale would require hiring help - potentially lots of it. How do you make sure that one of the workers does not just leave with the hard drive? It would require security on the level employed in gemstones mines (personal search for every employee who leaves the premises etc.) Kind of hard to set up in a bulletproof way - the potential finder could just let the relevant security people in on the profits.

FatalLogic 5y ago
Offer a percentage of the proceeds to the finder's team. Rationally then, they would be satisfied to give the drive to their employers, because their employers are more likely (than anyone else they'd be able to find) to recover the data from a drive that is badly damaged, and to pay them a generous bonus, as agreed. It also incentivizes the workers to keep an eye on each other to prevent the drive being smuggled out of the site.

em3rgent0rdr 5y ago

"But a bitcoin wallet of the same street value fits on a micro SD, it could literally fall through a hole in your pocket." But you can make any number of copies of the wallet.

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago

I guess Ross Hannaman still hasn't found that thumbdrive.