It depends on the sorting process. I don’t know much about his situation. If the hard drive got thrown into the trash, then it is most likely in a plastic bag somewhere buried. However, if it went through some kind of electronic recycling program then it was probably stripped for metals and parts.

IMO, if the dude wants to walk around the dump for the rest of his life trying to find his $500 million treasure chest then let him. The only problem with that is, how many other people are going to want to find things in the dump? Are we just going to allow people to wander through the dump now?? Perhaps instead of suing, he should just find someone willing to front the money to buy the entire dump. Haha.

not to mention but he might not even have ever had the bitcoin to begin with and is just doing a fishing expedition for dump hard drives in hopes one does have bitcoin on it

Technicians that will probably demand a commission not a flat rate.

Never heard of anyone in that field doing this. If you walk into a computer repair place and say you need to recover data off a hard drive and they say they need to know how much the data’s worth before they can tell you the cost, you should probably just immediately walk out and go to a different store regardless because that’s probably a skeezy place.

Bitcoin is saved with a password that’s held in RAM, so typing a different password will open a different wallet. This is in addition to the secret key saved on the hard drive. There’s no telling how much money a hard drive has, even to the person recovering it.