News High court ruling ends man's hopes of recovering $750M bitcoin hard drive from a Welsh landfill — hard drive storing 8,000 bitcoins was lost over 1...

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Just so I think I understand.
The actual things on his hard drive were the 256 bit keys that prove that he is the owner of however many transactions it took to get that much bitcoin?
And so if he acquired all that bitcoin in lets say 1000 transactions that would take 256000 bits / 32000 bytes / 32 kilobytes ?
Was all this over potentially 32 kilobytes of data?
No, all that really matters is the 256-bit private key. There could be other data saved, depending on the crypto wallet application used, but the private key would be all that is needed to recover the bitcoin in question. Although the key on the hard drive is likely encrypted with a user password, so if he did recover the HDD he'd also have to remember that password in order to retrieve the key.
 
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The curious thing is the court REFUSED to block the council doing their OWN landfill searches for the drive....

If HE can't search because the drive is obviously destroyed (even if he PAID the council millions for the dig rights!), why are they specifically excluded from this restriction?
 
Humans simply suck as a species, this is simply a case of “innefficient envy”. The council has the chance at a potential windfall without any effort on their part … and even if the drive is never found money could be made on the inevitable Netflix special … if the search for Capones vault of buried treasure or unearthing the gold mine that was the legend of the gaming cartridge dump of ‘83 can turn to prime time riveting television mind fuel- then imagine what the search for the crypto cauldron of trash in ‘25 would mean to future generations of fortune seekers! But alas this in another case of “inefficient envy” tor I’m sure fly by night city council members are grinning they did it. They thought small! Good for them. Tax dollars hard at work.
 
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Whilst agreeing that the odds against finding it are severe, when it comes to the data being recoverable, it seems to be an unpredictable.

I have had data loss from HDD and FDs after just a few years. On the other hand, I have had 5.25 Floppy disks and disk drive that have spent forty years in the garbage, and they have still been readable. The drive, its big flywheel covered in rust: never expected it to work, but I was curious as to what was on these disks from early 1980's, What a shock I got when it worked straight out of the garbage pile.
 
Sometimes I wonder what this guy thinks when he reads about bitcoins in the newspaper, when he watches tv and the news anchor introduces a crypto guru who announces the new high record value of the coin, when he ovverhears two coworkers discussing about investing in crypto, when an ad pops up and says "become a millionaire, buy bitcoins!"... I mean the chances he goes mental over his loss are non zero...
 
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I mean the chances he goes mental over his loss are non zero...
Again, it's not like he put his life savings into them. There are people who did that and lost a bunch of it (plus got frozen out of the market) at FTX or lost everything (Mt Gox) or got hacked and their wallet was emptied, or fell for some other crypto-related scam.

This guy put almost nothing into acquiring them. Since then, he's lost far more by dwelling on his loss. That's the real tragedy. The sooner he moves on with his life, the better.

In fact, I heard an interview with him from right after the hard drive was lost and he actually sounded pretty down to earth about it. Too bad he let it keep eating at him.

One irony is, most people who had that many bitcoins, back when he lost the hard drive, would have sold most of them long before now. So, the actual amount he lost vs. some alternate future is probably a heck of a lot less than their current value. That's why it pays to be realistic about the counterfactuals, and not presume the alternative would've been a best-case outcome. If you look at it that way, it's also a lot easier to accept that you don't live in the best-case timeline, take your losses, and move on.
 
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What a lot of people may have overlooked/didn't think of those few words in-between the lines...
in which he had hoped to gain legal access to the dump for excavation or get £495M ($604M) in compensation from the council.
I think he was hoping to get a win in order to then claim for compensation just in case if he couldn't retrieve the HDD, which he most likely wouldn't be able to after all these years.
 
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If the drive were to be found there would probably be a very high chance of the data being recoverable as he said, as long as the platters are intact and it hasn't been exposed to strong magnetic fields or been buried next to a weak magnet the whole time. But there was very little chance of finding it when he first threw it out and now it would be virtually impossible.

The guy's an idiot though. He didn't even take the most basic steps to protect his wallet.
1) He should have had backups. I would have had it on a couple of offlined drives at home and a VeraCrypt file containing the wallet uploaded to a couple of cloud drives.
2) He should have plugged in and checked the drive before throwing it out.
3) He should have labeled the drive.
 
208dde49dbb983baf262b498b8fcebcc.jpg
 
They found all those Atari ET Game Cartridges in a landfill that was buried many years ago. I think they'd have a good chance finding a hard drive.
 
They found all those Atari ET Game Cartridges in a landfill that was buried many years ago. I think they'd have a good chance finding a hard drive.
B doesn't follow from A. How many ET cartridges were dumped and how? In some kind of identifiable box or otherwise as bare cartridges?

In this case, the hard drive was in a generic black garbage bag. Do you have any idea how many black garbage bags there are in a dump? And it's buried under more than 10 years of other garbage.
 
The difference between an encryption key that protects a drive with the single text file of "Hello, kitty"
Or a drive with the fully realized plans for a working cold fusion reactor.

Same small size. Vastly different end result.
“fully realized plans for a working cold fusion reactor” . Well….that certainly escalated quickly.
 
The below is from the story from the link on finding the ET games They had X marks the spot when they pored concrete over it to keep local kids from digging them up.



The game’s finding came as no surprise to James Heller, a former Atari manager who was invited by the production to the dig site. He says in 1983 the company tasked him with finding an inexpensive way to dispose of 728,000 cartridges they had in a warehouse in El Paso, Texas. After a few local kids ran into trouble for scavenging and the media started calling him about it, he decided to pour a layer of concrete over the games.
 
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Again, it's not like he put his life savings into them. There are people who did that and lost a bunch of it (plus got frozen out of the market) at FTX or lost everything (Mt Gox) or got hacked and their wallet was emptied, or fell for some other crypto-related scam.

This guy put almost nothing into acquiring them. Since then, he's lost far more by dwelling on his loss. That's the real tragedy. The sooner he moves on with his life, the better.

In fact, I heard an interview with him from right after the hard drive was lost and he actually sounded pretty down to earth about it. Too bad he let it keep eating at him.

One irony is, most people who had that many bitcoins, back when he lost the hard drive, would have sold most of them long before now. So, the actual amount he lost vs. some alternate future is probably a heck of a lot less than their current value. That's why it pays to be realistic about the counterfactuals, and not presume the alternative would've been a best-case outcome. If you look at it that way, it's also a lot easier to accept that you don't live in the best-case timeline, take your losses, and move on.
A billion dollars is going to eat at anybody … that’s game of thrones generational altering level wealth.
He was still idiotically careless. Why did he not stick a label on the drive and, why did he not have back-ups (note, not just one back-up)?
bwcause its 2013. Although even in 2013 a coin was worth $200. But up until that point it was pennies. But let’s not kid ourselves the world was not taking crypto seriously at that time other then money launders, scoundrels, criminals and the underground or the Silk Road and the the guys cooking the next money scheme did, so let’s be real his story from that time is not really that unique. What’s unique is that of the umpteen million things that come long where folks clamor this is it … actually turned out to be it. You are trying to place a 2025 mindset on the 2009 world.

It’s like setting up SETI parser and being like oh …it I was the one who actually found the aliens. Who knew, so tell us Nostradamus what does the future hold next?
 
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On a sidenote, regading your review on alternate.de concerning the G80-3000: with IBM PS/2 keyboard, you mean the Model M? This is still getting produced in Lexington by Unicomp; also, older models usually were even heavier, at least according to Chyrosan22:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A-vRZth7SI


If you're in Germany, you can buy a Unicomp for 190 Euro -- a year ago or so, price was 160 Euro -- from Thomas Hoof in Lüdinghausen: search for Unicomp on either thpg.de or manuscriptum.de.

Cheers and have a nice day

Mod Edit - Religious content removed
 
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