A not-unreasonable penalty for risking pollution of his ground water, especially since he probably did the same thing to electronics many times before. I can't believe nobody is talking about this. Illegal in many US states.
You go along, separate your stuff into several different piles. Pay fees for things like fridges, CRTs, etc. Then you leave.
The thing is... I don't actually believe that electrical equipment is really recycled. Stuff like monitors may have the most toxic bits removed, but I strongly suspect that all other electrical equipment is just put into landfill as-is.
Which means the guy has done all that he could to get it recycled, and that it's the authorities and government services themselves who are just dumping stuff in landfill even when it was delivered as recycling.
All that said... if it was recycled as advertised, then the chances of it still existing would be closer to zero than the current scenario.
Give me a break. Who doesn't throw hard drives into the trash? And are you really so sure hard drives are included in any of the state e-waste laws? I doubt very many if any.
I don't have anything to add to the conversation except for the fact that your comment made me literally laugh out loud at its absurdity and naivete. Thanks, I needed that.
Laptop drives just aren't as useful as desktop drives (most towers can take 3-5 3.5" drives, most laptops can take exactly 1x 2.5"), and this particular platter was probably only 64-256GB?
So, this raises an interesting question for me. Since the total supply of Bitcoins is limited by design, doesn't every forgotten or lost Bitcoin reduce the total supply?
In other words, suppose, hypothetically, that after all Bitcoins have been mined, I bought them all, stored them on a hard drive (with no backup, obviously), and then destroyed that hard drive (let's say I threw it into a black hole). Does Bitcoin still exist?
Yes. The lost currency is essentially removed from the pool. The result is deflation--because there is less supply, the currency is worth more. Goods cost the same, so the bitcoin value for a certain product/service drops.
At least this is what economics would seem to dictate. You can send tiny partitions of bitcoin, so it's really easy to send a millionth of a bitcoin, where if $40t disappeared from the USD, you can't give 1/1,000,000 of a dollar (not that you would anyhow, since you can't irreversibly dispose money--you just print more)
More plausible scenario: Bill Gates converts all his wealth to bitcoin, as will inevitably happen when bitcoin overtakes the dollar. He dies, but forgets to put his password in the will. oops.
Normally, if a rich person dies without a will (or without specifying their bank password), there are legal procedures for the heirs to fight it out in court and collect. With bitcoin, poof, it's gone.
The attitude of Newport council - everyone, really - seems pretty nuts to me. $7 million is about 185 kilos of gold. Imagine what would happen if someone lost that in a rubbish tip!
A soccer / football pitch has an area of about 7140 square metres.
They say the drive could be "3 or 4 feet deep" - let's just call that one metre. So it's only 7140 cubic metres to search.
Admittedly, that's 7140 cubic metres of foul trash. It will include soiled babies diapers, rotting food, female sanitary products, tins, bottles, etc etc.
Assuming you could find the drive at a cost of one million. (roughly £140 per cubic metre) That'd give you 6 million to share between you and the council.
I guess you could add some environmental fixing thing in there (removing any electronics that are found, recycling any glass or metals vent methane, etc, and give them £2m, and keep the rest?
Assuming there's not too much iron and steel in the land fill, it's might be possible he could find it with a sensitive enough magnetometer at 1 meter, maybe more so if you built a motor to move it around rapidly. I think the field strength at 1 meter might be something like 1 milliGauss, which should definitely be detectable. Walking the field and recording the magnetic fields might be possible, you'd at least know the range you needed. Secondly, any recent dated arial photos could maybe be used to determine a better approximation of depth, i.e. looking for a marker in the actual photo, then going to dig to find that marker, record the depth.
He is not the only one, back in 2010 I did mine 160 BTC, however at some point I stopped caring. Months later I had to format hard disk because ArchLinux did a great job breaking the whole system with an update, in the moment I just didn't remember that there were a BitCoin wallet in my system. Damn ArchLinux.
Although I didn't lose much as him. Now I kinda feel relieved knowing his mistake, he lost much more than me, I am sure that there are much others at the same spot. We all just contributed to elevate the bitcoin price by making misery out of our selves.
Come one, Arch is maybe one of the easiest distros to break but certainly one of the easiest to fix using chroot from USB live image.
Forums are very helpful, and also if some current update is possibly breaking there is a deep post on the homepage discussing how not to break the system and how to recover from a broken state.
A lazy install and a bad Arch Linux update (actually, a misinterpretation of some error messages on my part) reminded me why it was stupid to have /home on the same partition as everything else. Multipartition setups are trivial and will save your data (in my case I lost nothing but some toy OpenCL programs as it was my gaming rig, and most important stuff was kept on a shared partition).
People throw away money all the time. I used to do landfill design. Summers were spent on sites doing inspections. My former boss tells the story someone came looking for trash from a specific location. They ask, did anyone see metal box? They went to look for it and couldn't find it. Asked what was in the box, the response was "Money, a lot of money..."
If you throw something away by mistake your only chance is to get to the landfill before the truck does and hope they'll dump in a separate area you can pick through.
Seeing as he has a good idea of when it was thrown away surely that narrows down where it could be quite considerably. He just needs someone to invest some money in finding it with him for a share of the wealth. I wouldn't have given up if I were him.
That's assuming the data will still be intact when the drive is recovered.
Edit: I'd guess the odds of the data still being intact are close to zero. A drive is so fragile I doubt it survived. Consider it being thrown around in a garbage truck and then slowly buried under several feet of other trash. Several inches of trash at a time, over time, with trucks rolling over the area each time. Then, consider the weather and other garbage juices drenching the device.
There's a fair chance the drive is unreadable. Exposed to the elements, and when trash is put in a landfill it's not just dumped, it's mixed with earth and pushed around with bulldozers. I would not be surprised if it has been crushed.
Its probably all right. I worked in landfills and dug up old trash in expanding a site. Unopened glass soda bottles from 30 years ago, books in great condition, metal lunch boxes in great shape. The lack of moisture means it just sits there. It depends on how deep it was buried when it came off the truck and it survived the first pass at burying.
"Does anyone have a power adapter for this notebook? the battery is dead...."
Pardon my ignorance, but how do you prove a) He doesn't have a copy of the private key? b) He's telling the truth about mining them? c) Actually threw away the drive?
Talk to these guys, they're highly regarded in r/bitcoin and you can do it without compromising access to the coins: http://www.walletrecoveryservices.com/
I have misplaced Bitcoins currently worth in excess of $700,000 / £430,000. They were purchased a couple of years back.
I've not even started the search for them properly as I know how gutted I will feel if I definitely can't find them. At the end of the day, it's only money and there's always time to make more. Time is the one thing of which we have a finite amount!
If I lost 700,000$ of anything, I'm fairly certain I would quit work and devote myself to finding them. I mean, even if I spent a year doing it, that's a larger rate of potential return than anything I'll see in my lifetime.
Eventually over time, once all the bitcoins are mined and out and about in the world. They'll get lost for various reasons. Is there a way to recover these lost bitcoins and return them to circulation or is the artificial scarcity of bitcoins going to turn into real scarcity and drive up prices even more?
The bitcoin network demonstrated that with enough cooperation they can fix some issues (see the blockchain fork from a while back). However, as adventured said, there's no way to verify that any individual bitcoins in an old address are actually lost. Unless that address is strongly associated with you (very, very strongly) you can't simply assert that it's a lost address (especially since you can't use it anymore to send anything as verification). It's quite possible, especially with the way some people are using cold wallets/paper wallets, that a lot of inactive addresses are just people waiting for the value to go up (invest and forget). Or people who got a bitnickel from a faucet a couple years ago and have the wallet, but haven't found a use for it yet.
A digital currency could be designed with this in mind, but it would seemingly require an official ownership registry or something equally effective on identification (if you can't prove loss, you can't return them to circulation).
Much like with physical currencies, or gold, the reduction of outstanding supply increases the value for everyone else holding. There's no across-the-board right argument to whether that's a good thing or not.
Why does every bitcoin comment thread have this conversation? It doesn't matter if a tiny percentage of the currency does not exist in the marketplace or gets lost.
21 million / 0.00000001 = how many bitcoins can "exist".
So considering that there's no real blocking factors in how many bitcoins can be distributed, why does it matter if some get lost?
The value of the coins are hardly affected now that such a high level of adoption has occurred. Those coins weren't even in previous circulation in any marketplaces affecting prices.
There are some people who believe a realistic value for bitcoin in the success scenario could be circa 1 million dollars (if it were to partially supplant gold or USD).
As a thought experiment, if I google for landfill prices, I see prices like 40 million dollars for a landfill. So if you can mine one hard drive in that scenario, landfills should be massively more valuable.
[+] [-] akkartik|12 years ago|reply
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...
[+] [-] buro9|12 years ago|reply
Which was sourced entirely from "someone in the IRC channel".
Whether it's true or not is one thing, but if it is then the reddit source also says:
> He went to the "recycling centre" and they showed him around.
This makes some sense, I've 'recycled' before at places like this: http://www.hounslow.gov.uk/spacewaye
You go along, separate your stuff into several different piles. Pay fees for things like fridges, CRTs, etc. Then you leave.
The thing is... I don't actually believe that electrical equipment is really recycled. Stuff like monitors may have the most toxic bits removed, but I strongly suspect that all other electrical equipment is just put into landfill as-is.
If the story is all true then the facility in question is this one: http://www.newport.gov.uk/_dc/index.cfm?fuseaction=wasterecy...
Which is advertised as a recycling centre.
Which means the guy has done all that he could to get it recycled, and that it's the authorities and government services themselves who are just dumping stuff in landfill even when it was delivered as recycling.
All that said... if it was recycled as advertised, then the chances of it still existing would be closer to zero than the current scenario.
[+] [-] kbutler|12 years ago|reply
boggle
You weren't on the Apple-Samsung or Newegg juries, were you?
[+] [-] eterm|12 years ago|reply
However, it looks like the UK implementation of the WEEE[1] is fairly narrow in scope.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electronic...
[+] [-] pbreit|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nilved|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yafujifide|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|12 years ago|reply
CPU based bitcoin mining, probably solo without a pool, 7000+ coins. Ha. Those were the days.
[+] [-] Buge|12 years ago|reply
So this guy made up more than 1/7 of the entire bitcoin network?
There were less than 6 people besides him that had as powerful of computers?
[+] [-] giarc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinhboy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliverstorm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yelnatz|12 years ago|reply
Even if the HD was ok, they won't even bother opening it up.
[+] [-] JanezStupar|12 years ago|reply
I could imagine the headline: "Retired computer tech regrets telling everyone of the Bitcoin treasure trove".
Talk about bad financial decisions.
[+] [-] rcthompson|12 years ago|reply
In other words, suppose, hypothetically, that after all Bitcoins have been mined, I bought them all, stored them on a hard drive (with no backup, obviously), and then destroyed that hard drive (let's say I threw it into a black hole). Does Bitcoin still exist?
[+] [-] MAGZine|12 years ago|reply
At least this is what economics would seem to dictate. You can send tiny partitions of bitcoin, so it's really easy to send a millionth of a bitcoin, where if $40t disappeared from the USD, you can't give 1/1,000,000 of a dollar (not that you would anyhow, since you can't irreversibly dispose money--you just print more)
[+] [-] tedunangst|12 years ago|reply
Normally, if a rich person dies without a will (or without specifying their bank password), there are legal procedures for the heirs to fight it out in court and collect. With bitcoin, poof, it's gone.
[+] [-] topynate|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] judk|12 years ago|reply
Look forward to treasure hunters attacking the site though.
Bitcoin disks may be the future of buried treasure.
[+] [-] DanBC|12 years ago|reply
They say the drive could be "3 or 4 feet deep" - let's just call that one metre. So it's only 7140 cubic metres to search.
Admittedly, that's 7140 cubic metres of foul trash. It will include soiled babies diapers, rotting food, female sanitary products, tins, bottles, etc etc.
Assuming you could find the drive at a cost of one million. (roughly £140 per cubic metre) That'd give you 6 million to share between you and the council.
I guess you could add some environmental fixing thing in there (removing any electronics that are found, recycling any glass or metals vent methane, etc, and give them £2m, and keep the rest?
[+] [-] batbomb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joggg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edubart|12 years ago|reply
Although I didn't lose much as him. Now I kinda feel relieved knowing his mistake, he lost much more than me, I am sure that there are much others at the same spot. We all just contributed to elevate the bitcoin price by making misery out of our selves.
[+] [-] MichaelApproved|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ed209|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbq|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jtsummers|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acomjean|12 years ago|reply
If you throw something away by mistake your only chance is to get to the landfill before the truck does and hope they'll dump in a separate area you can pick through.
[+] [-] FrankenPC|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warbastard|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelApproved|12 years ago|reply
Edit: I'd guess the odds of the data still being intact are close to zero. A drive is so fragile I doubt it survived. Consider it being thrown around in a garbage truck and then slowly buried under several feet of other trash. Several inches of trash at a time, over time, with trucks rolling over the area each time. Then, consider the weather and other garbage juices drenching the device.
It's a goner...
[+] [-] ams6110|12 years ago|reply
But who knows?
[+] [-] acomjean|12 years ago|reply
"Does anyone have a power adapter for this notebook? the battery is dead...."
[+] [-] Jagat|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chuckd1356|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] john_b|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sogen|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] incision|12 years ago|reply
Been meaning to figure out how to script something to run through variations on the type of password I would have used.
[+] [-] citricsquid|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bafjohnson|12 years ago|reply
I've not even started the search for them properly as I know how gutted I will feel if I definitely can't find them. At the end of the day, it's only money and there's always time to make more. Time is the one thing of which we have a finite amount!
[+] [-] ep103|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vijayboyapati|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jtsummers|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|12 years ago|reply
A digital currency could be designed with this in mind, but it would seemingly require an official ownership registry or something equally effective on identification (if you can't prove loss, you can't return them to circulation).
Much like with physical currencies, or gold, the reduction of outstanding supply increases the value for everyone else holding. There's no across-the-board right argument to whether that's a good thing or not.
[+] [-] simplemath|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|12 years ago|reply
21 million / 0.00000001 = how many bitcoins can "exist".
So considering that there's no real blocking factors in how many bitcoins can be distributed, why does it matter if some get lost?
The value of the coins are hardly affected now that such a high level of adoption has occurred. Those coins weren't even in previous circulation in any marketplaces affecting prices.
[+] [-] ericb|12 years ago|reply
As a thought experiment, if I google for landfill prices, I see prices like 40 million dollars for a landfill. So if you can mine one hard drive in that scenario, landfills should be massively more valuable.
[+] [-] Perseids|12 years ago|reply