Judge ends man's 11-year quest to dig up landfill and recover $765M in Bitcoin
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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.
Perhaps if he had offered to pay in advance...
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.
Those who have sufficient resources and expertise to find it know that there's obviously not going to be anything there, which means the only people who try digging for it are those incapable of actually finding it, perpetuating the myth.
But finding one of 2^256 private keys would take millions of years. This math felt correctly conservative https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2847/how-long-wo...
There’s a chance that if Moore’s Law holds, a computer might catch up after decades of continued exponential growth. But my money’s still on the trash spelunker in that race
Sounds dystopian and probably is, but also I feel like I would kinda enjoy remotely excavating trash as an occasional hobby. You know, hop on the Discord with the gang, make a battle plan, you take the copper wiring, I’ll shore up the tunnel.
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.
I agree that it'll likely be worthless in 150 years. We just don't need any massive upheaval for that to happen.
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
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.
Run at a reasonable rate - should be relative straightforward for a team to pick through the garbage, particularly because it's metal.
This project gets rebooted when/if bitcoin hits $1mm.
There's no way he's digging up anywhere near that amount quietly.
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.
Not that the guy would see any of that money either though.
[EDIT: to scan for the most common crypto wallets]
And this is supposed to be legal, somehow?
The potential for somebody somewhere in the e-recycling chain to harvest data is clear.
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]
The other part of the strawman is b) nobody said anything about a "proposal for a business practice", you invented that, honestly no idea why. It's the opposite of what I meant: that individuals at any point in that chain could do questionable stuff.
We can conjecture all we want about the legal basis of accessing digital media that has been donated and shipped abroad to be recycled/landfilled, esp. in an untraceable way to countries without much rule of law; there are tons of reasons why this is unlikely to see the inside of a courtroom in a hurry.
If you could somehow guarantee that there is a hard drive with a recoverable $765M on it in that landfill, that would be a very different scenario.
Dilution in time counts as well.
> Howells claims it "was taken from his home without his permission or consent on the morning of 5th August 2013"
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.
E.g. destroy half the gold in the world, price doubles...