Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...
However, it looks like the UK implementation of the WEEE[1] is fairly narrow in scope.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electronic...
boggle
You weren't on the Apple-Samsung or Newegg juries, were you?
2. I wasn't recommending that be the legal penalty. But if karma decides to be a bitch to this guy, hey I ain't complainin'.
3. I was exaggerating for effect. Seemed for a good cause: We human beings are total bastards towards the environment.
This is a neat example of contemporary use of the externalities concept in political discourse. First, although the word appears in your statement like a totem, you're not using it correctly. Second, your second sentence doesn't support your first, unless you assume that the harm from polluting the environment is infinite. If we priced pollution perfectly for everyone, people would keep polluting because society would rather have some pollution and some products than no pollution and no products. Raising the cost of polluting will lower the amount of pollution, but there is no reason to expect that it will lower the amount of pollution to zero, and the position "keep raising the cost until the activity disappears" is grounded in religion, not economics. It requires you to assume that the harm of the taboo activity is so great that no amount could ever be desirable.
Which was sourced entirely from "someone in the IRC channel".
Whether it's true or not is one thing, but if it is then the reddit source also says:
> He went to the "recycling centre" and they showed him around.
This makes some sense, I've 'recycled' before at places like this: http://www.hounslow.gov.uk/spacewaye
You go along, separate your stuff into several different piles. Pay fees for things like fridges, CRTs, etc. Then you leave.
The thing is... I don't actually believe that electrical equipment is really recycled. Stuff like monitors may have the most toxic bits removed, but I strongly suspect that all other electrical equipment is just put into landfill as-is.
If the story is all true then the facility in question is this one: http://www.newport.gov.uk/_dc/index.cfm?fuseaction=wasterecy...
Which is advertised as a recycling centre.
Which means the guy has done all that he could to get it recycled, and that it's the authorities and government services themselves who are just dumping stuff in landfill even when it was delivered as recycling.
All that said... if it was recycled as advertised, then the chances of it still existing would be closer to zero than the current scenario.
The thing is... I don't actually believe that electrical equipment is really recycled
The guy told me that they'd accept it all, but next time I might as well toss everything but the paint into the trash, as that's what they were going to do with it. Pretty disappointing.
"Howells stopped mining after a week because his girlfriend complained that the laptop was getting too noisy and hot while it ran the programs to solve the complex mathematical problems needed to create new Bitcoins."
He should definitely have found another way...
CPU based bitcoin mining, probably solo without a pool, 7000+ coins. Ha. Those were the days.
Many of us wrote it off.
I dug up a year old hard drive to get back 0.05 BTC the other day :-)
So this guy made up more than 1/7 of the entire bitcoin network?
There were less than 6 people besides him that had as powerful of computers?
A 128GB flash drive costs around 5 times as much as that enclosure. Yes, it's better, but it's quite more expensive. A more comparably priced 32GB flash drive stores several times less data (which might matter to you) and may have write speed that can't even saturate USB2 (ditto; I installed Fedora on a 16GB flash drive that has max 3MB/s write speed and it takes amusingly long to install updates, though its read speed is decent and doesn't suffer seek time).
Flash drives will get cheaper, but the meaning of "5 years ago" will change just as quickly (given current trends).
I have the USB 3.0 and thunderbolt adapters for the USM cases. Manufacturers should really switch to this format.
Probably scrap it for the magnets at some point. Those are much better than the fridge magnets you find at the store!
Even if the HD was ok, they won't even bother opening it up.
I could imagine the headline: "Retired computer tech regrets telling everyone of the Bitcoin treasure trove".
Talk about bad financial decisions.
In other words, suppose, hypothetically, that after all Bitcoins have been mined, I bought them all, stored them on a hard drive (with no backup, obviously), and then destroyed that hard drive (let's say I threw it into a black hole). Does Bitcoin still exist?
At least this is what economics would seem to dictate. You can send tiny partitions of bitcoin, so it's really easy to send a millionth of a bitcoin, where if $40t disappeared from the USD, you can't give 1/1,000,000 of a dollar (not that you would anyhow, since you can't irreversibly dispose money--you just print more)
1) New Bitcoins are created every 10 minutes until we reach ~21M bitcoins.
2) Some people will refuse to sell their Bitcoin to you.
In theory, if you can wait until year ~2140, send all the Bitcoins in the world to your address and delete the private key from your hard drive (and brain), then yes. But then, maybe someone could get really lucky and guess your private key. But both those scenarios are uninteresting because they are impossible in practice (they are about as likely as the Flying Spaghetti Monster being real).
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#What_if_someone_bought_up_all...
The equivalent situation in the real world would be if someone secretly bought half the world's oil supply and then hid it, or at least just sat on it. The price goes up since there is now less oil available.
Normally, if a rich person dies without a will (or without specifying their bank password), there are legal procedures for the heirs to fight it out in court and collect. With bitcoin, poof, it's gone.
You may happen to 'find' the bitcoin keys with some forensics, or it may never be found.
Look forward to treasure hunters attacking the site though.
Bitcoin disks may be the future of buried treasure.
They say the drive could be "3 or 4 feet deep" - let's just call that one metre. So it's only 7140 cubic metres to search.
Admittedly, that's 7140 cubic metres of foul trash. It will include soiled babies diapers, rotting food, female sanitary products, tins, bottles, etc etc.
Assuming you could find the drive at a cost of one million. (roughly £140 per cubic metre) That'd give you 6 million to share between you and the council.
I guess you could add some environmental fixing thing in there (removing any electronics that are found, recycling any glass or metals vent methane, etc, and give them £2m, and keep the rest?
This sounds like it would be an incredibly unwise and risky investment, even if you pretend that you will definitely find the hdd.
Although I didn't lose much as him. Now I kinda feel relieved knowing his mistake, he lost much more than me, I am sure that there are much others at the same spot. We all just contributed to elevate the bitcoin price by making misery out of our selves.
It may happen eventually, but hopefully we will have migrated to stronger crypto by then. I do wonder what will happen to abandoned coins at that point. Will they become invalid after a migration period, or will they be up for grabs to the fastest cracker?
Making them invalid would be self-defeating to bitcoin, but it's not bitcoin's fault that some day abandoned wallets will become breakable, there will never be an everlasting bullet-proof encryption, and my point is: It won't happen tomorrow, it may take tens or hundreds of years, but it will certainly happen.
Perhaps there could be a solution whereby a nLockTime'd transactions could be presented during the migration period. I haven't thought through the details.
Either way, treasure hunting in the future will almost certainly be of the digital variety.
If you throw something away by mistake your only chance is to get to the landfill before the truck does and hope they'll dump in a separate area you can pick through.
Edit: I'd guess the odds of the data still being intact are close to zero. A drive is so fragile I doubt it survived. Consider it being thrown around in a garbage truck and then slowly buried under several feet of other trash. Several inches of trash at a time, over time, with trucks rolling over the area each time. Then, consider the weather and other garbage juices drenching the device.
It's a goner...
At beast it's a speculative attack to be considered in a risk assessment, not a real attack anyone ever actually uses.
I'd welcome any information about people really using electron microscopes to get better than 63% per bit recovery.
But who knows?
"Does anyone have a power adapter for this notebook? the battery is dead...."
I absolutely cannot understand why anybody would ever throw money at some unverified sob story...
I do; and I do it because I'm not completely cynical about the general public. I actually think most people are telling the truth. I could be very wrong, but nothing in my life has indicated as such. I have no idea what that indication would look like, but my default is to believe people unless I have a reason not to.
If I hear about somebody's house burning down on the local news, I might chip in a few dollars so that they can get their kids new clothes or whatever. I hear the same story, on reddit, 4chan, HN, whatever, from the alleged victim, and they are coming to me with this story and a collection jar? I'm sorry, I am going to require at least some local news confirmation, and it seems like even that isn't good enough with some of these scams.
And don't even get me started on how in most of these cases the jump from "here is my sob story" to "and that is why I need money" is completely missing. The connection there is clear when a house burns down, but "I threw something out, then later learned it was worth a lot"? "I am a server who was insulted/was not tipped"? Uhuh. If I see a donation cup, and no connection between "sob story"->"now I need lots of money", I don't think that there is any rational conclusion besides "it's a scam".
Been meaning to figure out how to script something to run through variations on the type of password I would have used.
I've not even started the search for them properly as I know how gutted I will feel if I definitely can't find them. At the end of the day, it's only money and there's always time to make more. Time is the one thing of which we have a finite amount!
A digital currency could be designed with this in mind, but it would seemingly require an official ownership registry or something equally effective on identification (if you can't prove loss, you can't return them to circulation).
Much like with physical currencies, or gold, the reduction of outstanding supply increases the value for everyone else holding. There's no across-the-board right argument to whether that's a good thing or not.
21 million / 0.00000001 = how many bitcoins can "exist".
So considering that there's no real blocking factors in how many bitcoins can be distributed, why does it matter if some get lost?
The value of the coins are hardly affected now that such a high level of adoption has occurred. Those coins weren't even in previous circulation in any marketplaces affecting prices.
By an ever decreasing significancy as the market cap expands and BTC of value are held onto with care.
To your first part, why would 1 BTC lost when it's worth $1000 have a greater significance than 1 BTC lost when it's worth $1,000,000?
EDIT: Unless you mean any individual wallet's share of BTC is likely to be less, in which case the odds of losing as much BTC in a single incident is significantly reduced.
Exactly. The only common narrative of these lost BTC is an earlier ignorance by the owner and a rapid increase in price. That is the only reason "millions" get lost. Once prices stabilizes via increased market cap and average BTC/owner is reduced, this narrative stops being prevalent and large scale.
With hyper-deflation, spending $1,000,000 in the morning would be a losing proposition because by nightfall you might buy the same good for $1,000.
Both suffer severe problems, economically, but who loses and who wins changes. The matrix is something like this:
Inflation| Buyer | Seller |
---------+-------+--------+
Early | Win | Lose |
---------+-------+--------+
Later | Lose | Win |
---------+-------+--------+
Deflation| Buyer | Seller |
---------+-------+--------+
Early | Lose | Win |
---------+-------+--------+
Later | Win | Lose |
---------+-------+--------+
Of course, there's no way to ever prove some coins were lost or not so the point is moot.
In a roundabout way I agree with you, just not for the same reasons.
In effect the lost coins are already priced in, I just find the idea of lost BTC fascinating.
As a thought experiment, if I google for landfill prices, I see prices like 40 million dollars for a landfill. So if you can mine one hard drive in that scenario, landfills should be massively more valuable.
seriously though, every bitcoin owner can thank him for reducing the available supply.
If he can crack the encryption then why not just crack the largest wallets instead.