My favourite part from this story covered on another site was
Howells says that if only the council had entertained his excavation requests, “Newport would look like Dubai.” Currently, it still looks like Newport.
Does he really think $500M would significantly change a city? As if the city would get any part of it, or that Dubai is something to desire…
For all the talks about freedom and “decentralised” utopia the crypto bro cults spew all the time, they are really just obsessed with making absurd amounts of money fast. Their only motivation is greed.
Can’t say I’m surprised some regard Dubai as a goal. They only see the rich man’s club, they don’t care about how the sausage is made.
Their only motivation is greed.
Gee, i’m so glad brick ‘n’ mortar banks are different… oh, wait…
Most likely he won’t find that treasure. Instead of wasting years of his life, and not the worst of them, he could be spending time with girls or working his ass off for some more certain value to spend as he sees fit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m so glad I’ve spent my 2 or 3 bitcoins back in the early years for some 60€ software…
This is the type of “buried treasure” story that kids have these days.
I just imagine a movie like The Goonies but instead of talking about a cave full their treasure, they tell stories about the “flash drive full of gold” that’s buried somewhere in the deepest reaches of the garbage dump.
Drives probably rusted away to nothing by now, even if he miraculously could find it the odds of getting anything from it are probably less than him winning the lottery.
Technicians can work wonders as long as the seals to the spinny bits are intact. It would be cool to see even if it’s just bitcoin
Technicians that will probably demand a commission not a flat rate. Might be wrong on that because I doubt he’ll find it.
Landfills are huge and a metal detector would be completely useless in this scenario. He has absolutely no idea where on the landfill it would be how deep down it would be or even if it’s definitely in there. Don’t a lot of places like this pull out anything that might be useful and sell them?
