Man who lost $780 million in Bitcoin in a landfill now wants to buy the entire dump before city closes the site
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cryptocurrency/landfill-concealing-8-000-bitcoins-valued-at-usd780m-to-transform-into-a-solar-farm-but-man-now-wishes-to-buy-the-siteOpen linkView original on lemm.ee366
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This saga has been a ride so far. There is no way this guy is mentally stable at this point, he is going to do anything and spend every dime he has until he's either found it or he brushes his teeth with a .38.
It became his Moby Dick.
It all ends with him finding it, wedged under a broken glass pitcher. He cuts himself badly and because he owns the whole landfill, and is nuts, his phone is dead and he bleeds out before he can get help.
I’d watch it!
Hell I’d fund it, but my money is tied up in a landfill at the moment.
I mean, if you notice that you had and lost 700 millions you have to have a really strong mind to not go crazy. If it was me I think I would go crazy.
It's a far cry from this guy's situation, but I think I had five or six bitcoin back when I was mining in the early days. I cashed out when they were maybe $40-50 each towards a new GPU.
Sure, I could go nuts thinking about what I would do with the money now, but if I hadn't sold at that rate, I probably would have sold at $100, or $200, or...
There's no way in hell I would have had the discipline to "hodl" to this point, so I just get on with my life.
I had a few in my digital wallet that disappeared. I've looked for it for hours. oh well... when I last accessed it, the rate was probably less than $20 each, so I figured I lost a couple bucks... I would have sold them forever ago so no use thinking about what they're worth now
I sold mine for about $1,000 each and never looked back. It was free money. I would have never held them past $2k, much less 100k
I've got a couple fractions sitting in a wallet I've had for ages that I just don't plan on selling at this point, maybe if it went to like $1m per coin or something stupid.
I'd written it off ages ago so seeing the price climb is interesting.
yeah i lots dozens. and i have an SSD that died with the keys to 5 more. I'm not losing sleep over it
Yeah, but if those Bitcoin were "out there somewhere", and you'd never have to think about money ever again if you found them...
He lost the coins in 2013 or before. The price was then $15 or even lower...
If he just bought 100 BTC for only $1.5k in 2013, he'd now have 10 million dollars....
exists
It will become the modern day oak island
What are the chances the hard drive would still be readable, I wonder?
And keep backups, folks.
the only reason I'm not this guy is that my hard drive was landfill long before it arrived at the dump and was exposed to the elements for over a decade.
also my wallet was encrypted and there is no way in fuck I'm remembering the longest password I ever used.
I mined on CPU so what I lost was then pennies that currently amount to hundreds of billions so if there was even the smallest chance it could be recovered I'd be in this headline.
Also a cpu miner and it was in the hundredths of a cent per coin when I did it. It sucks but that drive is long gone and not worth it to fret over. It was also in the hundreds of millions at todays cost
You'd be surprised what's recoverable, especially if it's an HDD.
There was a recovery service I could send customer drives to that could recover a drive in a fire, flood, buried, shattered etc. The question was, how much did you want to pay for the service. One quote came back over 75k.
It depends how it was stored. If it is just raw dogging the garbage pile? The odds get very low but, theoretically, it is just a matter of very carefully the drive before booting it up. Think "data forensics"
If it was stored in a plastic bag or box? Then it is about as safe as a drive in your closet that you haven't spun up in over a decade.
It gets compacted in the garbage truck and compacted some more at the landfill. I think the odds are slim it could be found in one piece
garbage truck compacting isn't really that much, check out what it looks like when they dump it. lots of stuff doesn't get exposed.
The drive would have been fed to the incinerator where I live. We don't use a dump, we have a huge waste to power transfer station.
Compacting at a landfill however ….
Dumped out of the truck into probably another sorting area where machinery pushes through it potentially prying out large salvage pieces for scrap, or destructively breaking it apart by driving through and over it.
Over, and over, and over, and over.
Different landfills have different policies/procedures.
Like I said, the odds aren't great. But if there was ever any chance of finding it, this isn't the kind of system where things are getting cubed every step of the way. And once there is a layer or two of trash above it (making finding said drive nigh impossible), it is going to be pretty protected from even heavy duty constructicons driving over it.
I'm curious about what the missing word is. Cleaning? Inspecting?
I would be shocked if it was still readable. He probably had a shot very early on, but now? Seems hopeless.
a surprising ammount data can be gotten off surprisingly damaged drives, there is always the possibility, thats why it took a delte/write/delete/write process, a rare earth magnet, 3 guys, a sledge hammer, and a industrial shredder to throw away a hard drive in the army.
Even trying to recovery half a private key seems like it would be quit a challenge?
Sad story.
That's enough money to have a good life and provide a good life to your loved ones. If he never finds it, he is a crazy man. If he finds it he is a smart man. A normal person can't earn that much in a lifetime. Even a miniscule chance of finding it could drive someone to obsession.
For the sake of his sanity, and for a good story, I hope he finds it, but I doubt he will.
With his monkey paw luck, he'd find it just as Bitcoin crashes and loses nearly all value somehow
It's spent like a decade in a rainy landfill in Wales.
Even if he finds it, it's fucked.
Landfill design is really interesting, and hard drives are very well sealed and aluminum. It would be sitting in a fairly well drained spot, if the seal was not perforated during compaction there's a good chance the platters are readable.
Hard drives are not sealed, unless they're helium drives. They have breather holes to equalize pressure, and rubber seals around the data interface that can degrade.
And that doesn't count being crushed in a garbage truck or other heavy equipment.
Check out Rai stones.
My dad lives on Yap for a few years as a kid. My grandparents had a 2' diameter rai stone until they died. It's with my aunt now.
Enough money? It's three quarters of a billion... That's an unreasonably large amount.
This is just a modern iteration of the book HOLES, and it takes place in a landfill instead of a dry lakebed.
I never read or watched Holes, is it any good?
Actually, yeah, it's pretty fun for what it is. 78% Rotten Tomatoes/76% User Score, for reference. 7.0 on imdb.
I never saw it but read it. Yes, 10/10, highly recommend.
The book and movie are both pretty good I think
A gold-digger
He ain't messin with no
Can Elmo say the word if Elmo is singing his favorite song?
Imagine elmo singing
That takes some effort to work into foreplay, especially with the voice.
What are the odds that even if he finds that thumb drive that it even still works? LOL buy it dumbass, let us all know how that works out for you.
Very low. I think he dropped below the break-even point on this several years ago.
Thing is, the drive increases in value all the time.
Thing is, the drive data retention decreases over time
Yeah but theres no way of knowing if its viable or not at this point, so the only known factor is the value of BTC and the cost of money spent searching for the drive. Even if it fails break even (cost > value) that changes over time.
Was it a thumb drive? I thought it was a hard drive. Might even still be attached to the motherboard in a desktop.
If it's a traditional hard drive with moving parts the chances of it still working are zero. Data recovery maybe possible if the platters are still somewhat intact but I doubt he'd even find it to begin with.
It'll likely be ruined either way. Municipal waste is a mix of solids and liquids that gets crushed, shoved, and tumbled around before being compacted down by heavy treads and buried in layers. Anything electronic is likely to be damaged in all that.
Actual Bitcoin mining is a lot like sifting through a trash heap
Thats a really harsh description for crypto-bros.
That thumbnail though, lmao.
He lost the coins in 2013 or before. The price was then $15 or even lower...
If he just bought 100 BTC for only $1.5k in 2013, he'd now have 10 million dollars....
If my math is right then he would have had to have $117k in bitcoin at that time to have $780m now. That is a lot of money to lose even back then.
It's a needle in a haystack, but that's a really valuable needle. It might actually be worth it.
Yeah.
I mean I didn't buy $15 in bitcoin 15 years ago (have never bought any, never will), and I'm not obsessed about it.
Is it really any different for this guy?
I mean, if he also wants to take on the costs of doing all the remediation work and ongoing maintenance and surveillance for the rest of time that's probably a good deal for the city
Humanity’s greatest modern tragedy plays out in a Welsh trash heap. A decade-old hard drive—now worth $780 million—rots beneath layers of bureaucratic concrete and renewable virtue signaling. The council’s solar farm isn’t green energy—it’s a middle finger to crypto’s original sin, converting mined regret into panel wattage.
Howells’ desperation transcends greed. This is archeology for the apocalypse, sifting through diapers and coffee grounds to resurrect a digital pharaoh’s tomb. Offering $13 million to desecrate a landfill? Peak late-stage capitalism: valuing hypothetical ones and zeros over actual waste management.
The legal system’s verdict? “Lol, no.” Property rights dissolve when you’re up against municipal PR stunts. That hard drive’s entropy now fuels more than just regret—it powers garbage trucks.
greatest is quite a stretch
Oh, you’re right—forgot the /s. Clearly, a $780 million treasure buried under bureaucratic arrogance and greenwashing isn’t a tragedy. It’s a comedy! Who doesn’t love watching late-stage capitalism turn potential fortune into landfill fuel? Peak entertainment.
Old memes, hot nudes and millions in bitcoin, Har D. Drive achieved all of it. "My treasures? You can have yhem if you'll find them. Come find them in the abandoned privatized landfill!"
I'm Cap'n Raw D. Awg and imma be caPn oh the piRarates!!!
I have 3 dd dumps hanging out on my array waiting for a rainy day
Now you have my attention. This dude could get lots of people to search for free in the promise they’d get some scraps. I know two homeless dudes on the corner that would do this
What if this hard-drive is actually not within this landfill ;P
What if it is and it became unrecoverable ages ago?
it would be kinda funny that he actually found his drive again. But the data is indeed fully gone.
I hate this timeline.
One man's trash is another man's treasure.
What ever happened to the dude who had millions of coins stored on a password protected drive that he forgot the password to and was on his last attempt to unlock it?
I think he hired someone who found an exploit that then allowed a brute force technique at it actually got unlocked . The person hired got a percentage of the money.
Yes, but no.
That guy's a nut. All that effort would be better spent doing something useful with the money he keeps blowing.
He'll find it just before the end of his life, having ultimately spent $780,000,000.01 to succeed.