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Comment by nyc_data_geek1 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, 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.

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It'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.

Stratify by the dates on receipts, should it be too hard to narrow it down? $765M is a lot of money where I come from.

The article says that it was known at the time to be likely to be within a 2000m^2 block, narrowing beyond that will be harder since the rubbish is distributed across it (bulldozers keeping it somewhat level as dumping proceeds, rather than keeping it date-sorted). At the time that he first understood his loss the prospective value was $7.5 million: far from negligible but not a slam-dunk proposition for sifting through 10,000 tonnes of mixed bulk waste while continuing to operate the landfill.

You also need to account for the odds that the hard drive even contained the claimed BTC, and that it remains recoverable, even if found.

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.

Still 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?

I know next to nothing about landfills, but isn’t that bound to happen anyways, just over a much longer timespan?

The solution to pollution is dilution.

Dilution in time counts as well.

I’m genuinely curious how that works though, does garbage in eventually reach equilibrium with the rate it’s decomposing?

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