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.
Yeah wtf. Seeing Dubai as the ultimate utopia is so weird.
Their only motivation is greed.
Gee, i’m so glad brick ‘n’ mortar banks are different… oh, wait…
Last time I checked, most individuals are not, in fact, banks.
Last time i checked banks and “regulating” bodies are run by, you guessed it, groups of individuals.
Which are not, by far, most people. I am not sure why you’re bringing the subject of banks. Of course they’re shitty and mostly run by bastards. Okay.
But cryptomoney people are not banks, or groups of individuals. They’re individuals. And they’re in it because of the “get rich quick” scheme and push others to get into the pyramid’s lower levels, because that’s how they might get richer. So they’re either bastards or being conned, or probably both.
Proof of work is a power/hardware catastrophe, and proof of stake is entrusting power to the already rich again. Crypto is not a new economy model, it’s a bad subset of the old one with fancy fake ideals.
Most cryptocrrencies do seem scammy, i’ll give you that,
Yes, he’s stupid.
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.
Or that dubai was built with such a paltry sum
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.
But boy, if he does…
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.
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.
200k Doge, all gone, would have been a nice gift when it hit 50 cents…
Fun Doge tidbit, it gets criticized for having no limit to the supply (new ones keep getting added to the supply) but if Dogrcoins replaced US dollars less new dollars would be created every year than in the current system!
Id have had 100k if i sold at 20 cents. And that doesnt even factor in the thousands of doge i gambled away on pokershibes, a dogecoin poker site.
He may have bought them before hierarchical deterministic wallets were invented.
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.
10% of your portfolio is big.
I s’pose.
But compared to the silly geese who take an extra mortgage out to dump into crypto every time it hits an ATH, it’s nothing.
I had a fraction of Bitcoin mined, not bought, in early years when you could do that on a desktop PC. It was so unimportant for me, that this is the first time I’ve remembered about this. I suppose it costs now enough to care, but I still don’t.
While
he goes a little nuts and searches his entire apartment for it, but obviously has never found it
happens to me with searching for childhood’s toys, old drawings, attempts at poetry. But not this.
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.
That’s a really good point. So many of my friends who used silk road would be multimillionaires if they didn’t spend the btc.
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.
they bury it in dirty diapers and then they go over it with the crazy steamroller that has spikes on the wheel to make sure everything’s nice and flat
it’s already in pieces.
And if not, probably full of trash juice.
I’m so glad I’ve spent my 2 or 3 bitcoins back in the early years for some 60€ software…
This feels similar to cyberpunk “I’ve been a corporation once, kids” stories, and something about gold rush.
Still better odds than winning the lottery!
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.
“This is our time! Down here, this is our time!”
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
It would be so fucking funny if these bitcoins never existed and this is all one big ruse to trick crypto investors into excavating a landfill.
What does “let him try and find the hard drive” really mean? Does he just want access to the landfill or is he expecting some kind of cooperation with the workers? How disruptive is he going to be?
Very disruptive. Landfills typically bury the day’s trash at the end of the day and it’s just layers and layers of garbage, like lasagna. You might be able to work on Monday’s trash slice, but by the time Thursday rolls around, it’s time to add a layer on top of Monday.
Digging could interrupt the entire landfill process if it’s still an active landfill, meaning the daily garbage has to be redirected elsewhere, because landfills aren’t just a hole in the ground, they are a feat of engineering.
I’m a simple man. I see Practical Engineering, I up vote.
He can’t get the money to find it so he is suing the city to take the risk.
If he prepaid the $50 million to excavate, sort, and rebuild the landfill, there would be no problem.
🎵Money for nothing and checks for free🎶
bitcoin is just gambling and yall dropped your lotto ticket.
Chicks, not checks, btw.
Two checks at the same time, man.
Yortuk and Georg? You cruise correctly.
For $5M you can have all the chicks that you want… I joke that my wife keeps me in check and I keep her in cash.
I’ve heard about this dude since like…2018. At some point you have to move on. Shit like that will consume you, and it’s just not worth losing years of your life over it. Talk about a needle in a haystack.
It’s 500M though…
Well, it was. 11 years of landfill leachate have probably taken their toll, not to mention that it was probably crushed immediately under literal tons of soggy rainwater trash.
Life with friends and family is much more valuable than some extra 000s. Money can’t bring them back once they are gone. Nor can it be taken to the next life.
Okay, I see that. But it’s 500m tough…
Okay, there’s no chance he’s getting it back though…
Okay, but it’s 500m though…
You’ll get payed when we find it!
You really don’t want to set precedent here. What if any random person starts having hallucinations about hard drives being lost in the trash. You don’t want anybody to have the right to dig up your landfill
I’m not seeing a negative here? As long as they accept liability why shouldn’t someone be able to dig through landfill?
Air contamination, interruption of ongoing landfill operations, what if the landfills already capped? Do they get to reopen it? What contractors do you allow to do the work? Who takes the liability if they don’t fulfill the work to the specification? What if multiple people want to dig in the landfill at the same time? Who arbitrates? What’s the limit?
the potential liability exceeds the value of what they’re searching for.
I mean, as long as they are willing to pay all the costs of digging up a landfill up front… Why not?
Sure, if he buys the landfill from the city. I Don’t see a problem with that.
Anything short of that, disrupts current ongoing landfill operations.
Sometimes you can find scimitars in there. You can chop a camel right in its hump and drink all of its milk right off the tip of those things.
You throwing babies away?
How much egg is gonna be on his face when he finds it one day behind a cabinet drawer?
This article looks like someone “wrote” it using speech-to-text and didn’t double-check their work.
tossing a hard driving
the whole thing could be for not (instead of “the whole thing could be for naught.”)
and of course,
In a statement to Whales Online
Of course, if it turns out that whales have banded together to make their own website, I’ll stand corrected.
Well this guy would have been a whale if he’d backed up his keys.
Pretty sure he would still be a man, no matter how many keys he made.
This article is about a marine mammal. For other uses, see Whale (disambiguation).
Omg good one
Archive link: https://archive.ph/iKcYS
The new El Dorado.
Still, I’m not sure why the council are addressing their statements to “Whales Online”
Maybe more like the new Oak Island Money Pit.
In a statement to Whales Online
Ooooowwwaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh
