There was a lot of assumption on this guys part anyway in relation to the continued viability of that drive as a working or even recoverable unit. Slam a HDD around with a bunch of other trash, run over with a tractor, rain, cold...there is no telling if it was even in one piece and much less that long a time afterward. Guy was grasping for straws.
A hard drive can be relatively durable when not in use, and laptop drives will often be built to better sustain damage from impacts. So long as the sealed shell is intact and the platter containing the data is not seriously damaged, there is a reasonable chance of the data being recoverable. And I imagine they wouldn't just try to power the drive up if found, but rather have it dismantled with the platters transferred to a new drive in a data recovery cleanroom. The relevant files themselves should also be very tiny, reducing the chances of file corruption.
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.
Of course, shortly after the drive was lost, it would have been worth considerably less than today, probably only a few million dollars, and it's questionable whether that amount would have been enough to fund a recovery operation. With the data worth hundreds of millions now, there is more incentive to recover it, and a large-scale recovery operation might actually be logistically possible. I suspect if something similar happened to you, where you were reasonably confident that there was still a relatively high chance of successfully recovering lost currency, then you would do everything in your power to make that happen as well.
And yes, if he had never lost the data, he would have probably cashed out most of the currency back in 2014 or 2015 when it was on a continual downward trend for a couple years, at which point it would have been valued at less than a percent of what it is today.
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.
I'm not sure it would be "virtually impossible" to find. Garbage dumps typically bury trash in sections, and it's likely that there would be records indicating what area of the dump was being filled at the time when the drive went missing. You could also find things like receipts and best-by dates on food packaging indicating more precisely when trash in a particular area had been buried, perhaps allowing you to narrow it down to within a matter of weeks, greatly reducing the search area. The article suggested they had already narrowed it down to an area the size of about 7% of the landfill, but I suspect they could get much more precise once they started digging.
As for protecting the drive better, he claimed to have mined the coins back in 2010, when they might have not have been worth more than some hundreds of dollars in total, and he might not have even known if they would ever retain any long-term value. It's possible that he might have drifted away from following cryptocurrency, and did not realize how much their value had increased until he started seeing news reports as the price was skyrocketing in 2013. Even at that time though, the value probably wouldn't have been enough to make excavating a landfill practical. Now though, it might be. With their claimed value nearing a billion dollars, I'm sure there are investors who would be willing to invest some millions to search for the drive in exchange for a big cut of the proceeds should it be found intact and the data successfully recovered.
That is of course if he didn't make up the story for some reason. It does seem a bit weird that someone would knowingly toss out a drive without verifying its contents first, especially if they had previously used a similar bare drive for file storage. Though maybe he is adjusting the facts of the story a little to increase people's confidence that the data is recoverable. There might never have been a second drive that he intended to throw away. The drive may have just disappeared at some point, and he assumed it might have gotten tossed out with a stack of papers or something. Or the drive failed, and he tossed it out not realizing that the only copy of those files was on it, and that they would likely be recoverable.
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