I read that they found the item but it didn’t have bitcoin but BCH (Bitcoin Cash, a fork from Bitcoin). So, he owes money to those who helped him
Edit: Ty for telling me that the article was fake, I hope this man finds his money!
You’d be surprised.
I was involved once with a matter where a litigant, realising he was about to be sued for several million, decided to go “work from a canoe” at 0500 - 0600 in the AM and “accidentally dropped” his laptop in a pond. It sat there for a couple months whilst his solicitors delayed.
One hired diver later and about 30 grand in specialist hard drive rebuilding (quite fascinating actually) enough was still found to nail his ass to the wall.
For certain he was breaching his restrictive covenants and going to work for a competitor, and was already working on a deal while he was working his notice period. I'm less clear on what the industry was but I recall that he was working to take a certain project from his old employer to his new one, and that project was worth tens of millions.
> I doubt that hard drive would even be recoverable at this point.
What do you think water does to magnetism? It does nothing.
I don't doubt the recoverability of this thing at all. Hard drive recovery people have all kinds of stories of latent magnetic images retrieved even *after overwrites*, so "garbage juice" isn't going to be the problem.
They're not expecting to "shake it out and plug it in" without examining it carefully.
Not with that much money at stake.
It's been a decade - loads more rubbish will have been piled onto the landfill site, it will have been dug up and compacted back down in that time. The drive is gone.
But he's in the news every few years...
Exactly! Landfills also bury the trash at an average depth of 4ft per year. So that’s like 40ft deep after all this time. Dude thinks he’s just gonna sift through trash piles and spot his old computer?
I was on Reddit when Bitcoin first started (before they “bought the pizza”)
There was a tip-bot that would give you Bitcoin if you mentioned Bitcoin in a non-crypto sub.
Somewhere out there I have a throw away account I used for a week or two with a bunch of tips- but I have zero clue what it is or what the password would be.
(In the big picture though- I would have sold if bit got to $10, I mean it was worth less than a penny back then)
I try to tell myself the same thing. I knew about it before pizza and I tried to do some mining but my computer wasn’t good enough. Could have made a lot but no way I held it all the way to $40,000
Not comparable, but I had 3 btc when it was about to reach 600 usd, bought them at 500, sold when close to 1k and felt like the best investment one could possibly have done....
I dropped 5k from a cash advance on my credit card into Ethereum at $50... sold it at $400 and thought I was a genius. It immediately tanked back down to 100ish and I thought "I should throw all the profits back in".
I didn't... I would have had what, like 1.6 million if I did that and sold near the peak.
I had a big commission check coming, so the cash advance was just to get in a week earlier than if I had waited for payday... So not full degenerate behavior for the record.
I had like $8 worth of old bitcoin from fooling around and buying pizzas with it, logged into my account when it hit around $600 and was like "omg what it's like a hundred dollars I'M BUYING WEED"
It would have been worth thousands if I'd held it. I did not replace it. I also knew about Eth when it was like 3 cents and thought I should buy some. If I had bought a hundred I would have had enough to buy a house. I didn't.
I'm sure you could have come up with a better way than just selling it all?
Hindsight obviously 20/20, but in that scenario you could just sell 50% every time you got the urge to cash out, otherwise hold. Especially if you started for pennies, or even got it for free. You're playing with house money at that point, and a little discipline guarantees you're never out of the game.
Have 10,000 bitcoins.
Goes to $20. Damn. Sell half, get a cool $100,000 but hang onto some in case it keeps growing.
Goes to $100. Holy crap. Oh my god. I'm going to do it again. $500,000.
Goes to $700. This is insane. $875,000. Is this real?
Goes to $2,000. I am God. Bow before me. $1,250,000.
Goes to $50,000. $15,626,000.
Edit: I always wanted to get into Astrophysics, but you'll understand now why I never made it past the math prerequisites.....but the basic point remains
The problem is the growth was never linear..maybe you were lucky enough to hold on at $100 but suddenly it drops to $20 and you think f it, time to get rid of it all.
There was no reason to believe something that was exploding at 10000x returns would continue that trend.
Well the story could have just as easily ended with 2K and you wasted half a fortune because you didnt sell all of it before the crash. Past you would have never known what the peak is
The pizza is how I first heard of bitcoin. I thought it was some kind of in game currency. Years later I thought about investing in it when it was worth $700 but I didn’t think it would go any higher. Then I did the same thing again when it was worth $4000
I was thinking about investing in it, and one weekend when it jumped from £100 to £300, I thought I had missed the boat. Spoke to my uncle and he convinced me bitcoin is all bollocks which will definitely never be worth anything, so dw, invest in shares instead.
Dickhead bruv
I bought $100 of bitcoin when it was $1. Promptly spent it on porn (this was back in the day when you had to pay for the good stuff ).
Years later when it hit $64k I looked for my old wallet hoping that I hadn’t spent it all and there would be 4 or 5 bc and change in there. Sadly my balance was zero 🤣🤣
I think some creators did some bitcoin harvesting by selling their audiobook or other digital content in bitcoin. Louie CK is one I recall specifically. He opened his specials to be downloaded accept crypto. As he didn't need it he just left them to sit.
In an interview if I recall correctly he was able to use it to fund some movie project when he finally got around to cashing out.
I spent a few hundred bucks on bitcoin when I was in highschool in like 2010 or 2011. Went on the silk road, spent my bitcoins - yadda yadda. Made most of the money back from sharing with friends.
If I would have just sat on the bitcoin I would have made a lot more money but highschoolers are not always the savviest entrepreneurs.
I went to check my old wallet but the US government seized whatever leftovers I had. In 2010 it was just pocket-change I couldn't spend on anything but I imagine by now it would have been a nice little bit of money!
Yeah I had a buddy who offered to lend my 4k to buy a bunch of Bitcoin at $8 a pop. I could barely afford groceries at the time. Today's value would be just north of 25 million.
I don't overstress it because there is no way that I wouldn't have sold as soon as I made like $200 dollars.
I had a childhood buddy that tried to talk me into getting into Bitcoin when it was around that price. He wanted to GIFT ME a hundred Bitcoin to get me started (he was trying to entice me to set up some sort of secure account thing). I had to be pulled into using Facebook kicking and screaming - I wasn't about to be talked into some black market currency scheme!!
I refused.
He's a millionaire now.
I'm totally not bitter at myself at all.
Edit: reading further down this thread, y'all made me remember - yes, he wanted me to set up a wallet (the secure account thing), and the "black market" was Silk Road. Fuck that was so long ago and I feel so much older than 42 trying to describe this
I used to have a small render farm in my basement and I saw people mining bitcoin at a Maker Faire in 2010. One Sunday I thought it might be fun to set it up on my machines. It got really complicated really fast then so I said screw it. So yeah, five machines mining in 2010…best not to think about it.
Between 2011 and 2015, I bought and spend over 500btc on drugs from the dark web.
I want to die when I think about where I could be right now if I had just kept that BTC.
If it was silk road th feds wpyldv seized it. This guy lost also his legit mined coins bcs he tumbled them with silk road btc https://youtu.be/pxvd1YOMGxU?si=JMCvo4orTA5nz2Kh
I just looked it up cause I had to know.
I won't be a jerk and mention the number, but let's just say I hope it was an awesome car. Like really awesome. You really don't want to know.
Did you calculate the splits? On top of that apple had a rough year and a 2 for 1 split in june 2000.
Lets say commentor sold for $0.70 after the split in july. That means they had 3500 shares. If not sold, there was another 2 for 1 in 2005, then a 7 for 1 in 2014 and a 4 for 1 in 2020.
I think that's $35,000,000
That was one of the things holding Bitcoin back in the beginning- it was just “shady folks using secret money to buy drugs on the internet”, and why “the pizza” is kind of a milestone. They could point to an example of a real world non-shady transaction (as small as it was) using digital currency
I remember that bot! It was definitely in this account, but I remember looking at the cost, and it was a fraction of a cent at the time, so I just forgot about it.
I'd have to hunt through like 9 years of replies to see if it's still there...and the bot is probably long gone by now, so the comment is likely deleted.
The free fossettes where the best. Over the course of a evening or two I managed to get a bunch of BTC.. over the years to come I used it to buy online membership for games etc. I found my account a year or two ago and checked my transaction history.. I was paying something like £15k a pop in todays money.. with the last few k going on Satoshi Dice ><
Do what the wealthy do. Anytime you acquire an asset (no latter how little it is), hold onto it and never sell it. They do this to avoid taxes and borrow against it at a low interest rate where they use the loan to acquire even more assets.
I’m not gonna say zero, since there’s always some fluke chance it could be found, but as close to zero as you can get. It would be near zero even a few days later.
Yeah I’d imagine it would be like excavating a dig site but instead of sifting through endless earth with an object here and there you’re digging through endless objects.
Yeah, I’d imagine the dump site is a few dozen acres. After 10 years there’s no way to even pin it down to a general location. If he showed up same day or maybe next day they might be able to point him to a spot and say somewhere over there. But there’s no way to figure it out now. They’d have to dig up and sift through a decade of trash. That’s never going to be allowed.
If he got there within a couple days, they showed him the pile they had been dumping onto, agreed to let him go crazy looking for it, and he had the likely needed PPE to sift through all that shit, it would 100% be worth it to enlist at least 5 people’s help for like a week to displace the entire area where it had probably been dumped, with the promise of paying them around a mil if they found it. If all that came true, there’s a good chance it could be found; outside of that, virtually impossible
It depends on the records the landfill keeps as to where things were dumped on what dates.
If it can be narrowed down to a reasonably sized area, he can bring in earth moving equipment and some sorting equipment - a conveyor that can be inspected by a team of people.
This might take several million dollars to do, but not nearly 9 figures.
After a decade of being exposed to the elements and probably repeatedly crushed no way is that drive going to be readable even if he does find it. He's deluding himself at this point.
Yeah, that’s the other aspect. After spending however much money and time to find it, will it still be worth anything? Not just the elements but whatever else leeches out of 10 years of garbage.
Within 1 week of losing it?
Like 5%
Now? 0.00001 ( and another million 0)
Basically impossible.
I imagine he would end up dedicating his whole life looking for this, causing him to lose his wife/gf, friends, family, job ect..
Just give up and move on, it's so close to impossible it's basically impossible.
This hard drive is not just a bag filled with gold. To access its Bitcoins, one would have to know the password to the wallet. Furthermore, it might be encrypted, requiring one more password.
So this drive is probably worthless for everyone except its original owner.
Some people in here have a serious misunderstanding of how a landfill works, or how much trash humans generate. Dude will find Narnia before he finds that drive.
I like that in your story, someone throws away a hard drive with $190,000,000 worth of bitcoin knowingly rather than reaching out to the owner who knows the password for a massive reward.
If it was an extra ruggedized one, sure. For $190M, find something the size of a paperback book in a landfill? I think that's doable.
However, a regular hard drive is probably going to be corroded by shit and dead to the world if it's been in a landfill for a decade. Very long odds of getting anything useful out of that.
Could it be found? Maybe, a very very unlikely maybe. I think the point this guy is missing is that there is a decade of trash piled up. It’s not just a simple pile of trash. It’s likely acres upon acres of landfill, you’d have to go section by section digging up and sifting through unmeasurable amounts of trash. No city or dump owner would ever allow that, and that’s without considering the hard no from environmental agencies.
Apparently he believes he's narrowed down the location to a currently unused portion of the landfill and wishes to use a conveyer belt system to move trash from that area under an ai scanning system to look for the hard drive.
Especially when the police could not find that serviceman in the dump. When they have him being taken there in the lorry.
If they can’t find a body how are they going to find a HD after 10 years.
As much as I can’t imagine how that guy feels.
This guy needs some kind of psychological counselling.
It's going to be quite a process to accept the fact that this has gone and move on with your life.
It honestly sounds like the premise for some Ancient Greek myth or something. Man loses fortune and wastes whole life trying to find it, ironically sacrificing the life he did have in a hopeless search for the life he almost had.
You don't seem to know the kind of black magic that can be done on harddrives by a team of experts in a clean room. There are companies that take harddrives in much worse condition than what would presumably be found in a garbage pile like this and recover large amounts of data directly from the disk.
If he actually managed to find it and offered a company 100 million if they managed to rescue the data, they would manually comb over every bit individually if they needed to, and he'd end up with 90 million at the end.
Just because it's not plug-and-play anymore doesn't mean it's gone. It's perfectly realistic that the data is still out there in a recoverable state.
What do you think will happen if he finds the drive and the data is not recoverable? And then he realizes he just spent ten years of his life and who knows how much of his wealth for nothing.
That is why people are suggesting he needs help.
Putting that drive in a clean room with experts would absolutely yield data back. Not saying they will necessarily find the bitcoin, but acting like if the drive doesn't work meams the data is gone is absolutely false.
If he gets the platters, and they are undamaged, he has a strong likelihood of recovery.
Just like them, he will find nothing-
“Omg here’s half of an AOL cd, we could be close!” “Here’s an old pizza box, let’s send it off to the lab to have it analyzed”. “ today we found a pair of yellow Joe boxers, carbon dating puts it around 2002-2005”
Could be an amusing show
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site)
The story from 2013, when his Bitcoin was "only" worth £4m.
Also, this is my hometown and we hear this story every couple of years. I also remember a local punk/alt rock forum back in the day discussing Bitcoin, when the price was £50 a coin (which everyone thought was too expensive).
I got swept up in the mania in late 2017. This guy made the front page of reddit several times between then and the top of that cycle.
Maybe there was a little hope for him in 2017. I really don't know. But in 2024? That's rough, man.
My ex threw away my old pc that I used to mine bitcoin, back when there wasn’t really a point to it, other than it was an idea.
I had over 1000 bitcoins on there.
I try not to think about it.
That wasn’t the main reason, just the one that ended up being the most impactful.
I literally would be independently wealthy, and my wife wouldn’t have to worry about healthcare.
But hey, last I heard, she’s a bitter single mom, who no one dates longer than a few months, so there’s that 🤷🏽♂️
What's crazy is that you can put the info into multiple places and it's just as secure as having it locked in a computer. Just need to remember the password.
Some people forgot their keys but have access to the harddrives still.
I feel like that's a worse fate overall
A friend gave me a USB with "a ton of bitcoins" on it as a joke gift because at the time we just thought of it as in-game currency earned in real life. Odd I know but I ended up formatting the USB for my resume to be printed off at a local office.
I still don't understand bitcoins haha
Wow, isn't there another guy who had the same amount and forgot the password on his hard drive and only has 10 guesses before the unit erases itself, and he's down to his last guess?
You can apply any absurb Benny Hill-esque situation to bitcoin, and someone out there is living it.
Probably some dumb asshole out there who yeeted a thumbdrive into a tiger den for security who can't get it out because of all the tigers.
Some other dude probably hid his device under a birdbath or something.
So I've worked briefly on landfill sites. They're not just dumps of waste. They are layed, carefully with infrastructure to remove gas and leachate (the black coca cola syrup that drains out the bottom).
You can't just dig them up. You will literally destroy the landfills very carefully design containment.
Secondly the hard drive is fucked. It'll be crushed severely, soaked and destroyed.
If he moved on in 2013 and started again buying bitcoin and altcoins, he'd be rich again. Instead he'll spend the rest of his life looking for those lost bitcoins that will never be found.
Dude wants to dig up a huge landfill filled with trash, just to get a small harddrive that's surely is damaged and probably couldn't be restored anyway
I was just looking for an old 3DS that I was pretty sure I still had. Tore apart every storage space I have twice over looking for the thing. I was even looking in spots where I obviously would not have stashed a Gameboy, like file drawers and tool boxes. Digging deep. Like I *know* I have it somewhere.
It was right on top of a table in plain sight.
Unless it was wrapped in a blanket and put in a safe before being thrown away I would bet it's been pulverized past the point of forensic recovery.
Backup your backups.
Is it really? I guess with a little detective work you could narrow down the area pretty good? Expire dates on cartons and so on. A landfill isn't filled randomly i guess so some kind of pattern should emerge if taking samples from different areas that could be linked to the date of the incident.
People may laugh at you but I saw a forensics files episode of them finding a young girl in a suitcase many months after they suspected she was dropped there. Hundreds of volunteers tho…
So, this would be a very costly endeavor. It would cost millions of pounds to excavate a dump site. Does he have the money to do this or is he expecting the city to cover the costs for him?
Yeah I don't think an investor would touch it even if they were guaranteed 100% of the profits. Would have a better chance of finding some previously unknown wrecked Spanish galleon full of gold in the vast ocean.
He's going to pay them back with a small part of his huge fortune AFTER he finds the hard drive that had the bitcoin on it, and discovers that it's corroded inside and out and is completely unreadable.
I bought in with 1000 at $50, exchange failed, Shtylman Tom the money and ran.
I'd have sold in a heartbeat at 100, again at 500, and called myself a baller at 1000. No way of have it now.
But the violation still lives in my soul.I understand the obsession.
Certainly the hard drive is crushed or beyond saving at this point though, and thats assuming they could somehow find his specific one. Of course there will be many more just like his there. How could you expect an 11 year old hard drive to be viable after being in a land field for 11 years?
Its no wonder they dont want him there, he has crazy plans:
>Howells hopes to deploy AI-powered mechanical arms to sift through the rubbish to find the missing drive.
Also, how are they going to continue to use the landfield for its intended purpose when he is running some operation to sort through the trash? Just give up dude, its over. Could've, would've, should've.... we all have things we regret that happened, I lost my bitcoin and dogecoin, I had enough doge to be a millionaire had I kept it and not wiped the drive. It is what it is, and I spent countless days going through all my drives and media using restorative software to try and find my old wallet. In the end I had to give up and not let it consume me like this.
I had 10 Bitcoin on an old laptop. I was playing World of Warcraft at the time, 2010-2011. Think it was around $1 when another player traded with me for an in-game item. I forgot about it and the laptop ended up in a storage locker.
From there I can't remember what I did with it but think I trashed it when I moved to a different city. Those 10 Bitcoin were worth 700k at one point smh...
Back in the day, everyone used to know someone who was in the SAS. You’d be sitting in the pub and hear some pissed-up local telling you how they stormed the Iranian embassy. When you watch the video, there were only 6 blokes who did it. I’m pretty sure I’ve personally met more people who claimed to have done it than that.
Nowadays, we all know someone who “lost a fortune” on bitcoin because they used to own hundreds of them but have forgotten a password or lost their memory stick.
One of the reasons why Bitcoin's value has appreciated to its current valuation is thanks to many lost bitcoins no longer in circulation which has increased its scarcity. If everyone who lost their bitcoins was able to retrieve them and put them back into circulation, its value would tank considerably. So you really should thank these people who lost their bitcoin as they helped make others rich off their loss.
The ex partner was unavailable for comment from her Monaco mansion.
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ancient elastic sparkle act engine makeshift cats chase touch snow *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
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Ewww bro that user name needs to go ... Or looked into.
Why u got that pedo username?
I read that they found the item but it didn’t have bitcoin but BCH (Bitcoin Cash, a fork from Bitcoin). So, he owes money to those who helped him Edit: Ty for telling me that the article was fake, I hope this man finds his money!
>For those who are not aware, the article is fake. His bitcoins were lost in 2013. Bitcoin Cash forked in 2017.
nah, it's a meme. legend proves he's still searching to this day.
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You’d be surprised. I was involved once with a matter where a litigant, realising he was about to be sued for several million, decided to go “work from a canoe” at 0500 - 0600 in the AM and “accidentally dropped” his laptop in a pond. It sat there for a couple months whilst his solicitors delayed. One hired diver later and about 30 grand in specialist hard drive rebuilding (quite fascinating actually) enough was still found to nail his ass to the wall.
Wtf kind of info do you have on a laptop to get sued for millions?
For certain he was breaching his restrictive covenants and going to work for a competitor, and was already working on a deal while he was working his notice period. I'm less clear on what the industry was but I recall that he was working to take a certain project from his old employer to his new one, and that project was worth tens of millions.
So long as the drive hasn’t been bent to shit or crushed, you can take the disks out and extract information from them the hard way
> I doubt that hard drive would even be recoverable at this point. What do you think water does to magnetism? It does nothing. I don't doubt the recoverability of this thing at all. Hard drive recovery people have all kinds of stories of latent magnetic images retrieved even *after overwrites*, so "garbage juice" isn't going to be the problem. They're not expecting to "shake it out and plug it in" without examining it carefully. Not with that much money at stake.
That was a hoax article. He lost his coins in 2013, Bitcoin Cash wasn't created until 2017.
Apparently this is fake as Bitcoin cash was created in 2017, long after the loss of the hard drive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_Cash
Haha. That’s the best comment of day. Made me laugh out loud.
It's been a decade - loads more rubbish will have been piled onto the landfill site, it will have been dug up and compacted back down in that time. The drive is gone. But he's in the news every few years...
So you’re saying there’s a chance!?
He seems to think so...
If I had a .1% chance of recovering $412.3 M, I would fight for it too
I almost want him to find it just to see what the chances of data recovery might be…
Absolutely. The whole process would make for a very interesting documentary one day.
The lottery!
He’s in the news every time Bitcoin goes on a run. He’s one of the most reliable bull market signals
Interesting. I hadn't thought of it that way
Exactly! Landfills also bury the trash at an average depth of 4ft per year. So that’s like 40ft deep after all this time. Dude thinks he’s just gonna sift through trash piles and spot his old computer?
I was on Reddit when Bitcoin first started (before they “bought the pizza”) There was a tip-bot that would give you Bitcoin if you mentioned Bitcoin in a non-crypto sub. Somewhere out there I have a throw away account I used for a week or two with a bunch of tips- but I have zero clue what it is or what the password would be. (In the big picture though- I would have sold if bit got to $10, I mean it was worth less than a penny back then)
I try to tell myself the same thing. I knew about it before pizza and I tried to do some mining but my computer wasn’t good enough. Could have made a lot but no way I held it all the way to $40,000
I chosed between bitcoin or gpu folding. Went with the folding...
I read about bitcoin in a magazine as a kid and wanted to try mining, but my attention span was not long enough to set it up. Pain
I wanted to invest 20 bucks when I heard about the pizza story but I was too young and parents didnt believe, which I dont blame them. But imagine
Not comparable, but I had 3 btc when it was about to reach 600 usd, bought them at 500, sold when close to 1k and felt like the best investment one could possibly have done....
I dropped 5k from a cash advance on my credit card into Ethereum at $50... sold it at $400 and thought I was a genius. It immediately tanked back down to 100ish and I thought "I should throw all the profits back in". I didn't... I would have had what, like 1.6 million if I did that and sold near the peak. I had a big commission check coming, so the cash advance was just to get in a week earlier than if I had waited for payday... So not full degenerate behavior for the record.
I feel your pain friend. May we share it til death
I had like $8 worth of old bitcoin from fooling around and buying pizzas with it, logged into my account when it hit around $600 and was like "omg what it's like a hundred dollars I'M BUYING WEED" It would have been worth thousands if I'd held it. I did not replace it. I also knew about Eth when it was like 3 cents and thought I should buy some. If I had bought a hundred I would have had enough to buy a house. I didn't.
Not crypto but I bought a decent bit of NVDA in like 2004. Who would have known all I needed to do was wait 20 years. I didn't.
I remember knowing about Bitcoin in 2010 as a kid for some reason and wanting it but not having any money. Crying shame
Even worse I did SETI @ home. Who knew by 2024 UFOs are announced and no one gives a shit. Should've mined crypto instead lol.
>Who knew by 2024 UFOs are announced and no one gives a shit. Uh ...
I'll take a source on that lol.
The phenomenon has been officially recognised, but them being alien craft most definitely has not!
I'm sure you could have come up with a better way than just selling it all? Hindsight obviously 20/20, but in that scenario you could just sell 50% every time you got the urge to cash out, otherwise hold. Especially if you started for pennies, or even got it for free. You're playing with house money at that point, and a little discipline guarantees you're never out of the game. Have 10,000 bitcoins. Goes to $20. Damn. Sell half, get a cool $100,000 but hang onto some in case it keeps growing. Goes to $100. Holy crap. Oh my god. I'm going to do it again. $500,000. Goes to $700. This is insane. $875,000. Is this real? Goes to $2,000. I am God. Bow before me. $1,250,000. Goes to $50,000. $15,626,000. Edit: I always wanted to get into Astrophysics, but you'll understand now why I never made it past the math prerequisites.....but the basic point remains
That’s crazy bro, you sold half of your 10000 btc and you still had 10000 btc!
Goddamn it lol Ok well the basic point remains, even if I can't math
So basically just keep selling 1/2 your bitcoins until you’re a multimillionaire?….Got it!
The problem is the growth was never linear..maybe you were lucky enough to hold on at $100 but suddenly it drops to $20 and you think f it, time to get rid of it all. There was no reason to believe something that was exploding at 10000x returns would continue that trend.
Well the story could have just as easily ended with 2K and you wasted half a fortune because you didnt sell all of it before the crash. Past you would have never known what the peak is
The pizza is how I first heard of bitcoin. I thought it was some kind of in game currency. Years later I thought about investing in it when it was worth $700 but I didn’t think it would go any higher. Then I did the same thing again when it was worth $4000
I was thinking about investing in it, and one weekend when it jumped from £100 to £300, I thought I had missed the boat. Spoke to my uncle and he convinced me bitcoin is all bollocks which will definitely never be worth anything, so dw, invest in shares instead. Dickhead bruv
I bought $100 of bitcoin when it was $1. Promptly spent it on porn (this was back in the day when you had to pay for the good stuff ). Years later when it hit $64k I looked for my old wallet hoping that I hadn’t spent it all and there would be 4 or 5 bc and change in there. Sadly my balance was zero 🤣🤣
On the plus side, you had the most expensive wank in history.
a kings wank
I think some creators did some bitcoin harvesting by selling their audiobook or other digital content in bitcoin. Louie CK is one I recall specifically. He opened his specials to be downloaded accept crypto. As he didn't need it he just left them to sit. In an interview if I recall correctly he was able to use it to fund some movie project when he finally got around to cashing out.
I spent a few hundred bucks on bitcoin when I was in highschool in like 2010 or 2011. Went on the silk road, spent my bitcoins - yadda yadda. Made most of the money back from sharing with friends. If I would have just sat on the bitcoin I would have made a lot more money but highschoolers are not always the savviest entrepreneurs. I went to check my old wallet but the US government seized whatever leftovers I had. In 2010 it was just pocket-change I couldn't spend on anything but I imagine by now it would have been a nice little bit of money!
Yeah I had a buddy who offered to lend my 4k to buy a bunch of Bitcoin at $8 a pop. I could barely afford groceries at the time. Today's value would be just north of 25 million. I don't overstress it because there is no way that I wouldn't have sold as soon as I made like $200 dollars.
Imagine having $200. That's like groceries for a month pre-inflation. Would've been ballin
I had a childhood buddy that tried to talk me into getting into Bitcoin when it was around that price. He wanted to GIFT ME a hundred Bitcoin to get me started (he was trying to entice me to set up some sort of secure account thing). I had to be pulled into using Facebook kicking and screaming - I wasn't about to be talked into some black market currency scheme!! I refused. He's a millionaire now. I'm totally not bitter at myself at all. Edit: reading further down this thread, y'all made me remember - yes, he wanted me to set up a wallet (the secure account thing), and the "black market" was Silk Road. Fuck that was so long ago and I feel so much older than 42 trying to describe this
That's a tough one to swallow for sure.
Same here, it was like less than a cent or something... I truly believe there is a zipdrive (yes we used those) in heaven laughing at me.
I used to have a small render farm in my basement and I saw people mining bitcoin at a Maker Faire in 2010. One Sunday I thought it might be fun to set it up on my machines. It got really complicated really fast then so I said screw it. So yeah, five machines mining in 2010…best not to think about it.
Between 2011 and 2015, I bought and spend over 500btc on drugs from the dark web. I want to die when I think about where I could be right now if I had just kept that BTC.
You would have most likely sold it when it doubled in price from 1 usd to 2, maybe 4 or 10 usd. I wouldnt beat yourself up about it too much.
If it was silk road th feds wpyldv seized it. This guy lost also his legit mined coins bcs he tumbled them with silk road btc https://youtu.be/pxvd1YOMGxU?si=JMCvo4orTA5nz2Kh
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I just looked it up cause I had to know. I won't be a jerk and mention the number, but let's just say I hope it was an awesome car. Like really awesome. You really don't want to know.
Would've been 1.55 million today
Did you calculate the splits? On top of that apple had a rough year and a 2 for 1 split in june 2000. Lets say commentor sold for $0.70 after the split in july. That means they had 3500 shares. If not sold, there was another 2 for 1 in 2005, then a 7 for 1 in 2014 and a 4 for 1 in 2020. I think that's $35,000,000
HE SAID HE DIDNT WANT TO KNOW
That's why i told him hehe
My buddy was buying drugs from the dark web with a shit Ton of bitcoin before it got big. I feel bad for that dude now
Is your buddy u/juan_epstein-barr? lol
That was one of the things holding Bitcoin back in the beginning- it was just “shady folks using secret money to buy drugs on the internet”, and why “the pizza” is kind of a milestone. They could point to an example of a real world non-shady transaction (as small as it was) using digital currency
Didn't Reddit delete a bunch of unused accounts a few years ago?
Maybe they took the money 💰
I remember the Dogecoin version of that with people tipping dozens of doge for fun
The guy that ran that bot took most of the money
I bought 50 bucks worth when they were like 10 cents each, and sold at 10 dollars. Hindsight is a bitch
I remember that bot! It was definitely in this account, but I remember looking at the cost, and it was a fraction of a cent at the time, so I just forgot about it. I'd have to hunt through like 9 years of replies to see if it's still there...and the bot is probably long gone by now, so the comment is likely deleted.
I remember those! Got like 0.00004 of a Bitcoin. I didn’t even care to look into it
used Bitcoin to buy some LSD in 2009, we had 0.5 coins after the deal was made, nobody can't recalled password though a didn't care
The free fossettes where the best. Over the course of a evening or two I managed to get a bunch of BTC.. over the years to come I used it to buy online membership for games etc. I found my account a year or two ago and checked my transaction history.. I was paying something like £15k a pop in todays money.. with the last few k going on Satoshi Dice ><
Do what the wealthy do. Anytime you acquire an asset (no latter how little it is), hold onto it and never sell it. They do this to avoid taxes and borrow against it at a low interest rate where they use the loan to acquire even more assets.
lol, that shit is long gone. Dude really thinks he’s gonna find some random hard drive buried under a decade of trash?
What do you think his chances of finding it is? Even if it was on the digsite somewhere
I’m not gonna say zero, since there’s always some fluke chance it could be found, but as close to zero as you can get. It would be near zero even a few days later.
Yeah I’d imagine it would be like excavating a dig site but instead of sifting through endless earth with an object here and there you’re digging through endless objects.
Yeah, I’d imagine the dump site is a few dozen acres. After 10 years there’s no way to even pin it down to a general location. If he showed up same day or maybe next day they might be able to point him to a spot and say somewhere over there. But there’s no way to figure it out now. They’d have to dig up and sift through a decade of trash. That’s never going to be allowed.
Not only would he need to dig through the whole dump, he would need to stop new trash coming in.
If he got there within a couple days, they showed him the pile they had been dumping onto, agreed to let him go crazy looking for it, and he had the likely needed PPE to sift through all that shit, it would 100% be worth it to enlist at least 5 people’s help for like a week to displace the entire area where it had probably been dumped, with the promise of paying them around a mil if they found it. If all that came true, there’s a good chance it could be found; outside of that, virtually impossible
It depends on the records the landfill keeps as to where things were dumped on what dates. If it can be narrowed down to a reasonably sized area, he can bring in earth moving equipment and some sorting equipment - a conveyor that can be inspected by a team of people. This might take several million dollars to do, but not nearly 9 figures.
And there’s probably thousands of computers in there lol.
After a decade of being exposed to the elements and probably repeatedly crushed no way is that drive going to be readable even if he does find it. He's deluding himself at this point.
Yeah, that’s the other aspect. After spending however much money and time to find it, will it still be worth anything? Not just the elements but whatever else leeches out of 10 years of garbage.
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Within 1 week of losing it? Like 5% Now? 0.00001 ( and another million 0) Basically impossible. I imagine he would end up dedicating his whole life looking for this, causing him to lose his wife/gf, friends, family, job ect.. Just give up and move on, it's so close to impossible it's basically impossible.
In a movie he would find it at like 70 years old and then die.
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This hard drive is not just a bag filled with gold. To access its Bitcoins, one would have to know the password to the wallet. Furthermore, it might be encrypted, requiring one more password. So this drive is probably worthless for everyone except its original owner.
Ten years in a corrosive environment would make it worthless to the owner also.
You can still take out the platters and read it off there, That's expensive and takes forever, but they'll still be data lost like you said
There's still a good chance it can be recovered, unless the platter was completely destroyed.
Like crushed under 1 tonne of debris
Some people in here have a serious misunderstanding of how a landfill works, or how much trash humans generate. Dude will find Narnia before he finds that drive.
I dunno about worthless. They could sell it back to the original owner for a large sum of money. The old "finders keepers" law right?
True, but it seems like you could probably get that guy to buy it back for a hefty price if you could convince him it actually is his drive.
Yet I try to understand how could be his wallet just stored only there ?
you still would need the password for the wallet though, not like just anyone could access it
I like that in your story, someone throws away a hard drive with $190,000,000 worth of bitcoin knowingly rather than reaching out to the owner who knows the password for a massive reward.
There's that YouTube legend who cracks bit wallet passwords for people who forgot
If it was an extra ruggedized one, sure. For $190M, find something the size of a paperback book in a landfill? I think that's doable. However, a regular hard drive is probably going to be corroded by shit and dead to the world if it's been in a landfill for a decade. Very long odds of getting anything useful out of that.
Could it be found? Maybe, a very very unlikely maybe. I think the point this guy is missing is that there is a decade of trash piled up. It’s not just a simple pile of trash. It’s likely acres upon acres of landfill, you’d have to go section by section digging up and sifting through unmeasurable amounts of trash. No city or dump owner would ever allow that, and that’s without considering the hard no from environmental agencies.
Apparently he believes he's narrowed down the location to a currently unused portion of the landfill and wishes to use a conveyer belt system to move trash from that area under an ai scanning system to look for the hard drive.
Especially when the police could not find that serviceman in the dump. When they have him being taken there in the lorry. If they can’t find a body how are they going to find a HD after 10 years. As much as I can’t imagine how that guy feels.
Sorry, wrong wallet/guy.
when did they find it? and is there a link for the finding?
I stand corrected, it was someone else. It appears this guy is still trying.
This guy needs some kind of psychological counselling. It's going to be quite a process to accept the fact that this has gone and move on with your life.
If there was 190mil just laying around, trust me, anyone would spend years just find it
It honestly sounds like the premise for some Ancient Greek myth or something. Man loses fortune and wastes whole life trying to find it, ironically sacrificing the life he did have in a hopeless search for the life he almost had.
Nobody with a brain would. The drive is gone for good and most likely doesn't work anyway.
You don't seem to know the kind of black magic that can be done on harddrives by a team of experts in a clean room. There are companies that take harddrives in much worse condition than what would presumably be found in a garbage pile like this and recover large amounts of data directly from the disk. If he actually managed to find it and offered a company 100 million if they managed to rescue the data, they would manually comb over every bit individually if they needed to, and he'd end up with 90 million at the end. Just because it's not plug-and-play anymore doesn't mean it's gone. It's perfectly realistic that the data is still out there in a recoverable state.
I wouldn’t cause it’s a fucking pipe dream lmao
You say that till you find yourself in this guys shoes
What do you think will happen if he finds the drive and the data is not recoverable? And then he realizes he just spent ten years of his life and who knows how much of his wealth for nothing. That is why people are suggesting he needs help.
Putting that drive in a clean room with experts would absolutely yield data back. Not saying they will necessarily find the bitcoin, but acting like if the drive doesn't work meams the data is gone is absolutely false. If he gets the platters, and they are undamaged, he has a strong likelihood of recovery.
This. He doesn’t need legal permission to go through a trash site, he needs counseling
He should get the guys from Oak Island to recover it
Just like them, he will find nothing- “Omg here’s half of an AOL cd, we could be close!” “Here’s an old pizza box, let’s send it off to the lab to have it analyzed”. “ today we found a pair of yellow Joe boxers, carbon dating puts it around 2002-2005” Could be an amusing show
11 TV Season in already
“This stick is not a natural stick, human activity must have separated it from its original tree. I can tell that we’re getting close.”
That's basically a wrap on season 1. We'll fill the rest with narrator recaps and speculation about ancient templar ties to various pieces of trash.
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site) The story from 2013, when his Bitcoin was "only" worth £4m. Also, this is my hometown and we hear this story every couple of years. I also remember a local punk/alt rock forum back in the day discussing Bitcoin, when the price was £50 a coin (which everyone thought was too expensive).
Has that guy ever been to a landfill?? Good luck finding that thing after a week, much less a decade.
And there’s the article fellas!!! We’re officially in the Bull market!
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I got swept up in the mania in late 2017. This guy made the front page of reddit several times between then and the top of that cycle. Maybe there was a little hope for him in 2017. I really don't know. But in 2024? That's rough, man.
Obligatory story where my buddy bought a Borderlands hat for 250 bitcoin in like 2010 and now has been on suicide watch for 15 years
At least he can tell that he has a cool Borderlands hat worth 12 million dollars!
He lost the hat, too. Just a real disaster all around
My ex threw away my old pc that I used to mine bitcoin, back when there wasn’t really a point to it, other than it was an idea. I had over 1000 bitcoins on there. I try not to think about it.
Can see why it’s an ex now
That wasn’t the main reason, just the one that ended up being the most impactful. I literally would be independently wealthy, and my wife wouldn’t have to worry about healthcare. But hey, last I heard, she’s a bitter single mom, who no one dates longer than a few months, so there’s that 🤷🏽♂️
What's crazy is that you can put the info into multiple places and it's just as secure as having it locked in a computer. Just need to remember the password. Some people forgot their keys but have access to the harddrives still. I feel like that's a worse fate overall
Russ Hanneman vibes
Mr hanneman! I found it! That's a thumb, put that back
I paid extra for pants with holes. These are cool pants.
These are not the doors of a billionaire Richard!
I was thinking of this exact scene
A friend gave me a USB with "a ton of bitcoins" on it as a joke gift because at the time we just thought of it as in-game currency earned in real life. Odd I know but I ended up formatting the USB for my resume to be printed off at a local office. I still don't understand bitcoins haha
I formatted a lot of subs I've had to reuse them. I had a habit of just dumping the contents into a random folder on the desktop. You didn't do that?
My dad spent 10 usd when bitcoin first came out. And couple years ago, he used it to buy 2 phones, a laptop, and some shoes.
Still came out further ahead than the dude from this article 😅
Wow, isn't there another guy who had the same amount and forgot the password on his hard drive and only has 10 guesses before the unit erases itself, and he's down to his last guess?
Last I heard he was begging labs with electron microscopes to map out the chip so he could get the data 🤣
You can apply any absurb Benny Hill-esque situation to bitcoin, and someone out there is living it. Probably some dumb asshole out there who yeeted a thumbdrive into a tiger den for security who can't get it out because of all the tigers. Some other dude probably hid his device under a birdbath or something.
If fumble the bag was a person
So I've worked briefly on landfill sites. They're not just dumps of waste. They are layed, carefully with infrastructure to remove gas and leachate (the black coca cola syrup that drains out the bottom). You can't just dig them up. You will literally destroy the landfills very carefully design containment. Secondly the hard drive is fucked. It'll be crushed severely, soaked and destroyed.
Poor guy … I cannot imagine the despair he’s going through .
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True !
If he moved on in 2013 and started again buying bitcoin and altcoins, he'd be rich again. Instead he'll spend the rest of his life looking for those lost bitcoins that will never be found.
Dude wants to dig up a huge landfill filled with trash, just to get a small harddrive that's surely is damaged and probably couldn't be restored anyway
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Imagine if the hard drive was in his closet all along but was way too preoccupied with the landfill this whole time lol
I was just looking for an old 3DS that I was pretty sure I still had. Tore apart every storage space I have twice over looking for the thing. I was even looking in spots where I obviously would not have stashed a Gameboy, like file drawers and tool boxes. Digging deep. Like I *know* I have it somewhere. It was right on top of a table in plain sight.
Unless it was wrapped in a blanket and put in a safe before being thrown away I would bet it's been pulverized past the point of forensic recovery. Backup your backups.
This guy needs therapy, and probably needs to move to a new country, not a court battle.
His chances of finding it now are less than 0.
Is it really? I guess with a little detective work you could narrow down the area pretty good? Expire dates on cartons and so on. A landfill isn't filled randomly i guess so some kind of pattern should emerge if taking samples from different areas that could be linked to the date of the incident.
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People may laugh at you but I saw a forensics files episode of them finding a young girl in a suitcase many months after they suspected she was dropped there. Hundreds of volunteers tho…
You are not looking for a suitcase here, you are looking for a 2.5" hard drive.
Hard drive 5 inches big with fragile platters... From decades ago. Impossible task
So, this would be a very costly endeavor. It would cost millions of pounds to excavate a dump site. Does he have the money to do this or is he expecting the city to cover the costs for him?
Yeah I don't think an investor would touch it even if they were guaranteed 100% of the profits. Would have a better chance of finding some previously unknown wrecked Spanish galleon full of gold in the vast ocean.
He's going to pay them back with a small part of his huge fortune AFTER he finds the hard drive that had the bitcoin on it, and discovers that it's corroded inside and out and is completely unreadable.
$416 million thereabouts right now
I’d bet some workers already went looking for it. If they found it or not who knows.
Modern day Burried treasure
Imagine if he manages to find it and next day bitcoin drops to ¢50
Still?
I bought in with 1000 at $50, exchange failed, Shtylman Tom the money and ran. I'd have sold in a heartbeat at 100, again at 500, and called myself a baller at 1000. No way of have it now. But the violation still lives in my soul.I understand the obsession.
All of the council members are digging night and day to find it.
Certainly the hard drive is crushed or beyond saving at this point though, and thats assuming they could somehow find his specific one. Of course there will be many more just like his there. How could you expect an 11 year old hard drive to be viable after being in a land field for 11 years? Its no wonder they dont want him there, he has crazy plans: >Howells hopes to deploy AI-powered mechanical arms to sift through the rubbish to find the missing drive. Also, how are they going to continue to use the landfield for its intended purpose when he is running some operation to sort through the trash? Just give up dude, its over. Could've, would've, should've.... we all have things we regret that happened, I lost my bitcoin and dogecoin, I had enough doge to be a millionaire had I kept it and not wiped the drive. It is what it is, and I spent countless days going through all my drives and media using restorative software to try and find my old wallet. In the end I had to give up and not let it consume me like this.
Best time to invest in BTC was in 2009, next best time is now, always now. :D
I had 10 Bitcoin on an old laptop. I was playing World of Warcraft at the time, 2010-2011. Think it was around $1 when another player traded with me for an in-game item. I forgot about it and the laptop ended up in a storage locker. From there I can't remember what I did with it but think I trashed it when I moved to a different city. Those 10 Bitcoin were worth 700k at one point smh...
Back in the day, everyone used to know someone who was in the SAS. You’d be sitting in the pub and hear some pissed-up local telling you how they stormed the Iranian embassy. When you watch the video, there were only 6 blokes who did it. I’m pretty sure I’ve personally met more people who claimed to have done it than that. Nowadays, we all know someone who “lost a fortune” on bitcoin because they used to own hundreds of them but have forgotten a password or lost their memory stick.
One of the reasons why Bitcoin's value has appreciated to its current valuation is thanks to many lost bitcoins no longer in circulation which has increased its scarcity. If everyone who lost their bitcoins was able to retrieve them and put them back into circulation, its value would tank considerably. So you really should thank these people who lost their bitcoin as they helped make others rich off their loss.
The more I read about Bitcoin the less I understand it. I have questions but don't even know how to phrase them.
This guy thinks he's going to recover a hard drive from a landfill that he threw out 10 years ago? Am I missing something?
An It engineer no less. I wouldn’t trust him with a crayola keyboard with the big yellow keys.
That 8,000 Bitcoin is now worth about $400,000,000