5 ms·
Judge ends man's 11-year quest to dig up landfill and recover $765M in Bitcoin
- guywithahat 2y agoHonestly probably for the better. I can’t imagine what it would be like to accidentally throw away hundreds of millions of dollars, but he wasn’t going to succeed. He was going to spend the rest of his life begging for money to dig up and search for a hard drive, and then not being able to find it.
- smcin 2y agoYes probably. I wonder if in future places that process a lot of e-waste or e-waste donations would try to access any still-functioning hard drives or smartphones (if they haven't been wiped). [EDIT: to scan for the most common crypto wallets]
- qqqult 2y agodigital archeology
- compumetrika 2y agoHmmm maybe I should re-read A Fire Upon the Deep.
- thombat 2y agoBut to what end? Backup everything in case the owner comes looking later? The contents of a drive won't in general become the property of the recycling facility, since much of it will be constrained by licences or copyright.
- smcin 2y agoNo, just to scan for the most common crypto wallets/ contact managers/ login credentials, like some malware spearphishing attacks these days.
- ssl-3 2y agoSo if I recycle a copy of the key to my bank account, then the contents of that account become property of the recycler and my own copy becomes valueless if they elect to drain it out? And this is supposed to be legal, somehow?
- smcin 2y agoDon't strawman what I wrote: we were talking about crypto not bank accounts. Also, you know a lot of e-waste gets shipped to LDCs? (supposedly wiped and/or destroyed) The potential for somebody somewhere in the e-recycling chain to harvest data is clear.
- thombat 2y agoWhich is exactly why one of the perks of working in modestly-scaled corporate IT is getting to destroy the storage devices before they get taken for recycling. Wiping keys is quick and effective, but can't match a sledge hammer for unadulterated joy.
- ssl-3 2y agoA found crypto wallet is really just a copy of credentials that provide access to things described in a ledger, and where that ledger is stored elsewhere. It's not very dissimilar to a found copy of a bank account's credentials. The proposal here was for a business practice that would harvest and exploit these credentials. The main question was of the legality of this business practice. There is no strawman here. edit: I'm just going to leave this here, and dip out of this nonsensical doubletalk clusterfucked horseshit. > Yes probably. I wonder if in future places that process a lot of e-waste or e-waste donations would try to access any still-functioning hard drives or smartphones (if they haven't been wiped). > [EDIT: to scan for the most common crypto wallets]
- vrosas 2y agoSomeone in Hollywood is going to remake Holes with this exact plot.
- codetrotter 2y agoIf they give it a budget of $75M, maybe they’ll make $765M in revenue from the movie. Not that the guy would see any of that money either though.
- caro34 2y agoI believe it was mentioned somewhere before that he got his strategy wrong. He should consider applying for a job as a garbageman at the landfill and quietly digging... instead he make a mix of embarrassment fanfare of himself.
- do_not_redeem 2y ago> the Hard Drive was 'probably' located 'within an area of approximately 2,000 square metres of the site' and 'within an approximate volume of 10,000-15,000 tonnes of waste.' There's no way he's digging up anywhere near that amount quietly.
- geor9e 2y agoI'd be surprised if you got away with digging around for long before being fired for being in an off-limits area. Seeing as there's all those bulldozers shoveling the trash piles around.
- paulddraper 2y agoGood luck quietly digging through a decade plus of refuse by yourself.
- nyc_data_geek1 2y agoHonestly, a couple million X-prize type situation for a trash goblin bot that digs through the landfill semi-autonomously and retrieves hard drives would have a decent shot.
- Gualdrapo 2y agoStill the point they mention in the article would be valid - would such system digging into years of landfill pose a risk to public health and the environment by potentially releasing harming substances and whatnot?
- SteveNuts 2y agoI know next to nothing about landfills, but isn’t that bound to happen anyways, just over a much longer timespan?
- thombat 2y agoIt's a general purpose landfill for a town of 150,000 people and according to the original article he only understood his loss three months after disposal, in which time a further 10,000 tonnes of rubbish had been deposited. That small HDD will be surrounded by much larger items: not just whatever can be crammed into a wheelie bin but also possibly larger special items such as bedframes, furniture, etc. That "goblin" will have to be able to tunnel through compacted masses of steel and concrete while being delicate enough not to destroy the target, and definitely needs to avoid breaching the landfill lining. Probably best not to count on the stability of the tunnel it's making, so it will need autonomous power. Probably easier to go for the moon landing X-prize.
- tedunangst 2y ago> In January 2021, CNN wrote that Howells "has offered to pay the council a quarter of the current value of the hoard, which he says could be distributed to local residents." Perhaps if he had offered to pay in advance...
- geor9e 2y agoImagine him actually offering $191 million in cash for a 44 meter x 44 meter plot of trash. $2000 for every resident of the city. They'd riot if it got rejected.
- callamdelaney 2y agoNobody will back him with that sort of cash - there's a high likelihood he never had that much bitcoin.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoWaiting for the Discovery Channel to air "Hard Drive Wars" following the escapades of dumpster-diving mercenaries that, by cover of night, execute their cunning plans to recover the hard drive in question.
- tedunangst 2y agoTime for a Stalker remake.
- plaidfuji 2y agoAt this point why wouldn’t a slightly crazy treasure hunter investor offer to front tens of millions to like, buy the landfill from the city?
- callamdelaney 2y agoThey'd still need permission from the licensing authority technically, waste is a pretty highly regulated thing here and rightly so. Plus, this guy could be misremembering.
- rubyfan 2y agoYeah a lot of us that knew of bitcoin but didn’t really get in to it seem to remember generating a coin or two but can’t remember where we left it.
- Breza 2y agoAgreed. I became interested in Bitcoin in 2013. In 2017 I realized it was never going mainstream for payments when I saw CNBC talking about it without one reference to actually using it as money. I've become pretty cynical about the movement since then, though I wouldn't mind stumbling upon an old private wallet.
- thombat 2y agoThey'd need to provide sufficient confidence that they were going to continue to operate the landfill in accordance with all regulations, not just declare bankruptcy when the hunt is over and leave an unsafe mess and a financial black hole. Possibly the set intersection of treasure hunters with that character AND optimism that the drive remains useful is rather small.
- Trasmatta 2y ago> The council said that excavating the landfill site would let harmful substances escape into the environment, endangering residents with "potentially serious risks which raises public health issues and environmental concerns," the ruling said. The extreme unlikelihood of finding the drive in a salvageable condition combined with the near certainty of polluting the local community makes it a pretty clear decision to me.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- somethoughts 2y agoKind of interesting to imagine long term inflation due to long term lost crypto. It seems much easier to lose large amounts versus fiat currencies. Electronic money can be recovered (i.e. its given over to the government if left unclaimed as far as I know). And its hard to lose that much physical cash.
- 55555 2y agoOut of curiosity, is there any technology that could spot the hard drive underneath all the other trash? Some sort of radar?
- saalweachter 2y agoWhich hard drive?
- OJFord 2y agoCome on, 'all hard drives' would be fine, that would be a trivial workload to sort through compared to 'I believe it is somewhere in this landfill site'.
- xdennis 2y agoYou mean a metal detector? Having seen "Detectorists", I can tell you that they can be configured to find metal objects of a certain size. It would take a lot of time through.
- duskwuff 2y agoA metal detector in a garbage dump would pretty much be going off constantly. There's a lot of metallic waste that gets dumped (toys, mattresses, home appliances, etc) - only digging in places where you sense metal isn't going to rule much out.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoComment from previous discussion: If you search thru HN for the various submissions over the course of this case (over a decade old at this point!) you can see the wildly changing values of the bitcoin in the headlines. Once it was 6M, then 181M, then 80M, now it's 598M! Haha
- dcreater 2y agoYeah it's almost like the price of Bitcoin has gone up in that time
- trehalose 2y agoAccording to the article, the plaintiff's claimed number of Bitcoins has changed, not just their value in fiat currency.
- NewJazz 2y agoHe first claimed 7500, eventually 8000 BTC. Not much change in his story. The headlines are indeed evidence of bitcoin's wild price swings over the years.
- userbinator 2y agoNow that others know there's a potential bounty there, I wonder what the value of Bitcoin will reach before someone makes a future action.
- jcgrillo 2y agoImagine spending 11 years on this boondoggle.. Also, this is totally unhinged: > Howells claims it "was taken from his home without his permission or consent on the morning of 5th August 2013"
- duskwuff 2y agoThat's certainly a hell of a way of describing "my wife put it in the trash, and the garbage truck took it to the dump".
- thombat 2y agoOr his original: I asked her to take it to the dump, she said 'too busy, do it yourself', meanwhile I remembered I wanted to double check which drive I'd thrown out but she'd had a change of heart and taken it already.
- jcgrillo 2y agoIt doesn't matter which version. He threw the damn thing in the trash can! He made a careless mistake and tossed the wrong drive. Normally people think about it, learn a thing or two, get over it, and move on. Instead this jackass seems to see himself victimized by [checks notes] literally everyone? And he wasted untold human years of other people's time, and eleven of his own, all because he couldn't shrug off a silly mistake and learn to laugh about it. Pointless.
- danpalmer 2y agoI've always taken this story with a pinch of salt. The timeline is that the guy "had some bitcoin", then lost interest, then the hard drive was thrown away, and then sometime later saw the price and thought he should go looking for it. Did he actually have as much as he recalled years later? Did he not sell or transfer it for the little it was worth, and forget about that years later? Was the wallet encrypted with a password he won't remember? Did the hard drive get destroyed in the process of being thrown out? Did the data get wiped? Did it even go to this landfill? There are a great many ways in which this could result with zero bitcoin, even if they find the drive. I'm not surprised the council disallowed it. A 1% chance of £100m is only worth £1m, and it would be a costly endeavour to support.
- duskwuff 2y agoAnd even if the hard drive were somehow found, it's probably been destroyed by exposure to eleven years of leachate ("garbage juice"). Landfills are nasty places.
- snowwrestler 2y agoThis is going to end up like that pit on Oak Island that people think has pirate gold at the bottom. 150 years from now, National Geographic is going to be making TV shows about adventurers in hazmat suits digging in the landfill for the lost private key.
- echelon 2y ago150 years from now, bitcoin will most likely have zero value. There's far too much happening in the world to assume the shape of it will hold up that long, even if you're the biggest bitcoin bull. AI/AGI/ASI, quantum and post-quantum computing, WWIII and nuclear war, the space race, etc. And that's just scratching the surface of what might happen.
- Gigachad 2y agoI wouldn’t even bet on money as we know it today even existing that far ahead.
- Breza 2y agoI imagine life will be very different, but I doubt money won't exist. Just like how different the world is today compared to 150 years ago.
- Breza 2y agoOr an underappreciated risk to Bitcoin: people getting bored with it. That could happen much sooner than 150 years. I agree that it'll likely be worthless in 150 years. We just don't need any massive upheaval for that to happen.
- andirk 2y agoEverything ends eventually. Many fiat currencies based on "faith" have lasted more than 150 years though.
- unyttigfjelltol 2y agoI know brute force guessing a Bitcoin key is like an astronomical lottery ticket, but the odds can't be much worse than extracting a working hard drive from 15,000 tons of decade-old trash.
- zharknado 2y agoReminds me a bit of the gentleman who didn’t check his AMZN stock for ~20 years and found out it had gone to escheat with the state of Delaware. They had cashed it out years earlier for less than 10% of its present-day value. His play is to hope the hypothetical value continues to grow to the point that a specialist attorney will take the case and split the spoils with his kids. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/799345159 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/799345159
- tasuki 2y agoWhat should one do so their stock shares do not magically disappear like this?
- zharknado 2y agoThe main thing is logging into your brokerage account(s) at least once a year so the custodian knows you’re still active. Laws vary by state but a sounds like it’s often 4+ years of no contact/activity before they have transfer it to the gov’t. More broadly, you can lobby your representatives to require stricter criteria to be met before assets can be escheated in your jurisdiction. E.g. phone calls, multiple pieces of physical mail or have mail returned as invalid address in addition to the basic timeout period.
- tasuki 2y agoThank you. The problem is the custodian who makes me scared is not in my jurisdiction, but rather in the US...
- ides_dev 2y agoI feel bad for the guy. Every few years he reappears in the news making another attempt. Clearly it’s something that’s going to weigh on him for the rest of his life.
- lucyhendricks 2y ago[dead]
- Elizabeth0147 2y ago[dead]
- wisdomalfred 2y ago[dead]
- rolandthomas 2y ago[dead]
- Elizabeth0147 2y ago[dead]