347
Man who threw away $500M Bitcoin hard drive sues city for right to search landfill
(www.techspot.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
347 points (95.5% liked)
Technology
60052 readers
3048 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I remember hearing about this guy years ago. He probably is now devoting 10 (?) years of his life (I did not look it up) searching for his lost bitcoin, but I have got the feeling, that he will never find them.
But boy, if he does...
This is such a monkeys paw. You have a drive with $500 million USD of Bitcoin, but the drive is somewhere in the local landfill.
Such a curse, I can't imagine the regret they feel every day getting up for work.
After 10 years though, isn't it just gone/destroyed? Rain/corrosion would have destroyed the drive by now.
It's already corroded from the factory...hard drive platters use iron oxide. Can't rust rust. The mechanical bits may be trashed but the platter can most likely still be read with specialized recovery equipment.
Who could you even trust to send the drive to? Anyone who could read it could take the money and just claim it couldn’t be recovered.
I mean, companies exist specifically to do this for other big companies, I'm sure there are security procedures, background checks, NDAs and everything that needs to go with that.
Data recovery specialists exist, and nobody would pay for them if the data they were recovering wasn't, you know, valuable enough to pay a specialist to maybe retrieve it. They probably deal with multimillion dollar industrial/financial/business secrets all the time, and do it discreetly, or else their business wouldn't even exist.
If he had kept his seed phrase for his wallet, he would be able to recover the funds to a new hard drive. This was very common advice if you did a little bit of research before purchasing btc. I can't judge too much though as I ignored a dogecoin wallet when they were worthless but 500,000 doge suddenly felt less worthless once doge pushed past 5-10 cents, but by that time, my wallet was gone and I had lost my seed.
200k Doge, all gone, would have been a nice gift when it hit 50 cents...
Fun Doge tidbit, it gets criticized for having no limit to the supply (new ones keep getting added to the supply) but if Dogrcoins replaced US dollars less new dollars would be created every year than in the current system!
Id have had 100k if i sold at 20 cents. And that doesnt even factor in the thousands of doge i gambled away on pokershibes, a dogecoin poker site.
He may have bought them before hierarchical deterministic wallets were invented.
I have a friend in NY who lost a thumb drive with bitcoin on it in 2011. Every year or two he goes a little nuts and searches his entire apartment for it, but obviously has never found it. I think he threw it away and doesn't remember, but the exercise of searching helps him exorcise the demons.
I put about 10% of my investment portfolio in bitcoin, personally. It's way too volatile, at least for me, to go in big, but I can trust that every 3-4 years people are going to go insane buying it and the price will spike. If you're already invested you can benefit.
10% of your portfolio is big.
I s'pose.
But compared to the silly geese who take an extra mortgage out to dump into crypto every time it hits an ATH, it's nothing.
I had a fraction of Bitcoin mined, not bought, in early years when you could do that on a desktop PC. It was so unimportant for me, that this is the first time I've remembered about this. I suppose it costs now enough to care, but I still don't.
While
happens to me with searching for childhood's toys, old drawings, attempts at poetry. But not this.
The thing is, if he had access to his hard drive at any point in the last 10 years or so he would have sold his Bitcoin long before it was this valuable, like many, many other people who used to own Bitcoin and aren't currently millionaires. The fact that he lost his hard drive is the only reason it's actually worth anything.
That's a really good point. So many of my friends who used silk road would be multimillionaires if they didn't spend the btc.
I had a hard drive with five Bitcoin. Gave the old Gateway PC to a felon buddy who was down bad and trying to rebuild his life learning some coding way back in the mid 2010’s.
He threw the computer away for a new one. At the time it was 10,000 bitcoin for a pizza so never cared. I chuckle about it now, but it’s gone forever.
I don't understand how you accidentally throw a drive away. I have a drawer full of old hard drives that I put in there because at some point I'm going to wipe the data off of them before disposing of them but then I never do and I just leave them in the drawer.
I don't even think it would be legal for me to just throw it in general waste I'd have to take it to the actual depot.
they bury it in dirty diapers and then they go over it with the crazy steamroller that has spikes on the wheel to make sure everything's nice and flat
it's already in pieces.
And if not, probably full of trash juice.
I’m so glad I’ve spent my 2 or 3 bitcoins back in the early years for some 60€ software…
This feels similar to cyberpunk "I've been a corporation once, kids" stories, and something about gold rush.
Still better odds than winning the lottery!