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.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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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.
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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
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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.
Enough money? It's three quarters of a billion... That's an unreasonably large amount.
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.
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Check out Rai stones.
Although the ownership of a particular stone might change, the stone itself is rarely moved due to its weight and risk of damage. Thus the physical location of a stone was often not significant: ownership was established by shared agreement and could be transferred even without physical access to the stone. Each large stone had an oral history that included the names of previous owners.
In one instance, a large rai being transported by canoe and outrigger was accidentally dropped and sank to the sea floor. Although it was never seen again, everyone agreed that the rai must still be there, so it continued to be transacted as any other stone.
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This is just a modern iteration of the book HOLES, and it takes place in a landfill instead of a dry lakebed.
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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.
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.
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.
A gold-digger
He ain't messin with no
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.
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?
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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.
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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
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 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
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I hate this timeline.
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