
Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site - T-zex
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site
======
akkartik
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.

[http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...](http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=132204954)

~~~
buro9
The actual story was sourced entirely from this reddit post:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rilcj/as_a_person_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rilcj/as_a_person_who_did_not_invest_early_i_made_a_gif/)

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](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...](http://www.newport.gov.uk/_dc/index.cfm?fuseaction=wasterecycle.centres)

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.

~~~
kaffeinecoma

        The thing is... I don't actually believe that electrical equipment is really recycled
    

I had something similar happen when I went to my local recycling center a year
after moving into a new town. I had carefully squirreled away a pile of
batteries (AA, AAA, D-cells, etc), old smoke detectors (which contain trace
amounts of radioactive elements), and some unused cans of latex paint. Saved
it all for the big trip to the recycling center.

The guy told me that they'd accept it all, but next time I might as well toss
everything but the paint into the trash, as that's what they were going to do
with it. Pretty disappointing.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Smoke detectors should be properly disposed of but alkaline batteries can be
thrown away. Long ago ordinary batteries used to contain some amount of
hazardous heavy metals but that's no longer the case.

------
yafujifide
Another way to mine for bitcoin.

~~~
erikig
My favorite quote from the article:

"Howells stopped mining after a week because his girlfriend complained that
the laptop was getting too noisy and hot while it ran the programs to solve
the complex mathematical problems needed to create new Bitcoins."

He should definitely have found another way...

------
ck2
_Howells ran a program on his laptop for a week to generate his stash_

CPU based bitcoin mining, probably solo without a pool, 7000+ coins. Ha. Those
were the days.

~~~
giarc
Something about hindsight being 20/20.....

~~~
ck2
Actually a good lesson about being an optimist vs pessimist.

Many of us wrote it off.

I dug up a year old hard drive to get back 0.05 BTC the other day :-)

------
vinhboy
Forget the bitcoins, why would you throw away a perfectly good, supposedly
working, hard drive? That's a shame. And before secure formatting it?

~~~
sliverstorm
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?

~~~
sdoering
Well, why not take a cheap case and have a nice, small, portable external.

~~~
brazzy
Because for the price of the case you can get a flash drive with similar
capacity than a 5 year old laptop drive, and much nicer, smaller and more
portable?

~~~
idupree
I can get a good USB2 enclosure for $10-15. My 6.5 year old laptop hard drive
is 120GB (and couldn't read/write data via SATA much faster than it can via
USB2 anyway).

A 128GB flash drive costs around 5 times as much as that enclosure. Yes, it's
better, but it's quite more expensive. A more comparably priced 32GB flash
drive stores several times less data (which might matter to you) and may have
write speed that can't even saturate USB2 (ditto; I installed Fedora on a 16GB
flash drive that has max 3MB/s write speed and it takes amusingly long to
install updates, though its read speed is decent and doesn't suffer seek
time).

Flash drives will get cheaper, but the meaning of "5 years ago" will change
just as quickly (given current trends).

------
JanezStupar
Well if Bitcoin really takes off, then someday it might be wise to go buy the
landfill and go search for the "Treasure of Newport".

I could imagine the headline: "Retired computer tech regrets telling everyone
of the Bitcoin treasure trove".

Talk about bad financial decisions.

~~~
draaglom
On the other hand, lying that there's £4M buried under a pile of rubbish would
be highly entertaining.

------
rcthompson
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?

~~~
MAGZine
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)

~~~
rcthompson
So what about my second question? If I bought all the Bitcoins and deleted
them, does that destroy the currency entirely?

~~~
olalonde
In practice, no because

1) New Bitcoins are created every 10 minutes until we reach ~21M bitcoins.

2) Some people will refuse to sell their Bitcoin to you.

In theory, if you can wait until year ~2140, send all the Bitcoins in the
world to your address and delete the private key from your hard drive (and
brain), then yes. But then, maybe someone could get really lucky and guess
your private key. But both those scenarios are uninteresting because they are
impossible in practice (they are about as likely as the Flying Spaghetti
Monster being real).

[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#What_if_someone_bought_up_all...](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#What_if_someone_bought_up_all_the_existing_Bitcoins.3F)

~~~
rcthompson
Actually, the question immediately above that one, "Won't loss of wallets and
the finite amount of Bitcoins create excessive deflation, destroying
Bitcoin?", really gets to the heart of what I really wanted to understand. My
phrasing was really meant as a "reduction to absurdity" kind of formulation,
as in "what if _all_ the Bitcoins were lost?"

------
topynate
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!

~~~
DanBC
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?

~~~
hnha
Would _you_ be willing to bet that it would still be worth as much when you
find it? It's not gold, it's bitcoins.

This sounds like it would be an incredibly unwise and risky investment, even
if you pretend that you will definitely find the hdd.

~~~
DanBC
Sure, but you can say that about a whole bunch of start ups.

------
batbomb
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.

~~~
joggg
something about the platter in the HD being a magnetic medium...

------
edubart
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.

~~~
ed209
When bitcoins are lost, are they lost forever? So the total pool of bitcoins
will be 21m - your 160 and his 7000?

~~~
Aldo_MX
I'm pretty confident that in the future it will be possible to break abandoned
wallets.

~~~
tlrobinson
Break wallets encrypted with a passphrase, or crack private keys? The former
is possible for weak passphrases, but if the latter is ever possible that's a
Very Bad Thing for Bitcoin.

It may happen eventually, but hopefully we will have migrated to stronger
crypto by then. I do wonder what will happen to abandoned coins at that point.
Will they become invalid after a migration period, or will they be up for
grabs to the fastest cracker?

~~~
Aldo_MX
I meant to crack private keys, it will eventually become viable to spend
resources researching/developing an attack vector to break those abandoned
wallets. Migration to better cryptos will certainly happen, but remember that
the lost wallets won't be upgraded, because they're, well, lost.

Making them invalid would be self-defeating to bitcoin, but it's not bitcoin's
fault that some day abandoned wallets will become breakable, there will never
be an everlasting bullet-proof encryption, and my point is: It won't happen
tomorrow, it may take tens or hundreds of years, but it will certainly happen.

~~~
tlrobinson
Agreed, though I'm not sure Bitcoin's users/miners wouldn't "vote" to
eventually invalidate unmigrated wallets. There's a tradeoff between
accidentally destroying someone's legitimate wealth (e.x. a nLockTime'd
transaction left as an inheritance) vs allowing crackers to eventually claim
potentially enormous abandoned wallets (worth billions, if not trillions of
dollars in the future). But remember those unmigrated wallets would also be
equally vulnerable to cracking as abandoned wallets.

Perhaps there could be a solution whereby a nLockTime'd transactions could be
presented during the migration period. I haven't thought through the details.

Either way, treasure hunting in the future will almost certainly be of the
digital variety.

------
acomjean
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.

------
FrankenPC
The next time I misplace my keys or forget to pay taxes on time, I'll be more
forgiving of myself.

------
warbastard
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.

~~~
MichaelApproved
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.

It's a goner...

~~~
nitrogen
For millions of pounds, it might be worth using an electron microscope to try
to pull the bits off if the platters can be recovered.

~~~
DanBC
electron microscope have really low odds of recovering anything useful.

At beast it's a speculative attack to be considered in a risk assessment, not
a real attack anyone ever actually uses.

I'd welcome any information about people really using electron microscopes to
get better than 63% per bit recovery.

------
ams6110
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.

But who knows?

~~~
acomjean
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...."

------
chuckd1356
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?

~~~
john_b
What incentive would he have to lie about any of this?

~~~
chuckd1356
He's already set up a wallet to receive donations. Imaginary internet points.
Exposure.

~~~
Crito
Collecting the donations changes everything. It seems like going to "the
internet" with a sob story and a paypal account (or bitcoin wallet in this
case) has been getting pretty popular recently, or at least has been getting
more attention.

I absolutely cannot understand why anybody would ever throw money at some
unverified sob story...

~~~
smtddr
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6806056](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6806056)

I do; and I do it because I'm not completely cynical about the general public.
I actually think most people are telling the truth. I could be very wrong, but
nothing in my life has indicated as such. I have no idea what that indication
would look like, but my default is to believe people unless I have a reason
not to.

~~~
Crito
I'm not completely cynical about the general public. I firmly believe that
most people are good trustworthy people who are kept in line by their own
sense of what is right and wrong, not the law. _However_ I am aware that there
is a _small_ fraction of the general public that makes a living scamming the
largely innocent and trusting general public.

If I hear about somebody's house burning down on the local news, I might chip
in a few dollars so that they can get their kids new clothes or whatever. I
hear the same story, on reddit, 4chan, HN, whatever, _from the alleged victim_
, and they are coming to me with this story _and_ a collection jar? I'm sorry,
I am going to require _at least_ some local news confirmation, and it seems
like even that isn't good enough with some of these scams.

And don't even get me started on how in most of these cases the jump from _"
here is my sob story"_ to _" and that is why I need money"_ is completely
missing. The connection there is clear when a house burns down, but _" I threw
something out, then later learned it was worth a lot"_? _" I am a server who
was insulted/was not tipped"_? Uhuh. If I see a donation cup, and no
connection between _" sob story"_-> _" now I need lots of money"_, I don't
think that there is any rational conclusion besides _" it's a scam"_.

------
incision
I have a 50 BTC wallet encrypted with a password I can't remember.

Been meaning to figure out how to script something to run through variations
on the type of password I would have used.

~~~
citricsquid
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/](http://www.walletrecoveryservices.com/)

~~~
incision
Interesting. I'll have to give that a look. I figured someone would have come
up with a service like this.

------
bafjohnson
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!

~~~
ep103
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.

------
vijayboyapati
Ironically, some real mining might be needed to get those bitcoins back!

------
bane
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?

~~~
Jtsummers
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.

------
simplemath
People keep saying 21 million bitcoins. There are a significant percentage
lost forever.

~~~
dmix
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.

~~~
Jtsummers
The divisibility of the currency doesn't matter for this calculation. Currency
represents wealth. There is a finite amount of BTC that will ever be
available. Any BTC that is locked away like this means there is less BTC to
represent the same amount of wealth (actually, it's a growing amount of wealth
presently). This means the value (or potential value) of each BTC has gone up.

~~~
dmix
> This means the value (or potential value) of each BTC has gone up.

By an ever decreasing significancy as the market cap expands and BTC of value
are held onto with care.

~~~
Jtsummers
I think there may be some confusion on my part in understanding your point. To
the second part, BTC loss will hopefully decrease. If loss/theft continues
it's represents a significant UX issue that will inhibit the growth of
bitcoin.

To your first part, why would 1 BTC lost when it's worth $1000 have a greater
significance than 1 BTC lost when it's worth $1,000,000?

EDIT: Unless you mean any individual wallet's share of BTC is likely to be
less, in which case the odds of losing as much BTC in a single incident is
significantly reduced.

~~~
dmix
> Unless you mean any individual wallet's share of BTC is likely to be less,
> in which case the odds of losing as much BTC in a single incident is
> significantly reduced.

Exactly. The only common narrative of these lost BTC is an earlier ignorance
by the owner and a rapid increase in price. That is the only reason "millions"
get lost. Once prices stabilizes via increased market cap and average
BTC/owner is reduced, this narrative stops being prevalent and large scale.

~~~
Jtsummers
I still have a question, when will prices stabilize? Why does an increased
market cap imply stable prices?

------
ericb
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.

~~~
Perseids
Also - and much more profitable - you can just buy as many bitcoins as you can
afford right now and sell them when they reach a value of 10^6 USD.

~~~
ericb
Sure, but my thought experiment was more about 10-20 years from now when that
option is off the table.

------
lcuff
So, I can feel bummed for the guy, but my understanding of what happened here
is that he accidentally threw out something incredibly valuable. Don't blame
the victim for his stupidity, but don't feel required to reimburse him,
either.

------
nnq
Searching for it would give a whole new meaning to "bitcoin mining"...

------
tux
It amazes me how people keep loosing money O_o Even if it only worth $1,000
why would you ever put it in the bin ? What a waste =(

~~~
Jtsummers
It's essentially the same as throwing out holiday or birthday cards with a
cash gift inside (if it's a check it could be recoverable by contacting the
sender). Shit happens and people forget about things.

------
dnyce
ABCs of the data society we live in...Always Be Copying... your own data..
"Cmon son".

~~~
mangotree
I feel bad for you son, I've got 99 problems but a non backed up HDD ain't
one.

------
Datsundere
The more people loose bitcoins, the more expensive it will get too.

------
celticninja
perhaps they could use a magnet to try and find it.

seriously though, every bitcoin owner can thank him for reducing the available
supply.

------
TomGullen
Offer a £1m cash reward to landfill owner

~~~
georgemcbay
The original owner has less of a legal claim to the harddrive than the
landfill owner, so if the landfill owner were to find it why would he return
it for 1/4th the value?

~~~
boyter
If its encrypted like the guy says it is there is little chance of getting the
coins anyway.

If he can crack the encryption then why not just crack the largest wallets
instead.

------
yitchelle
Gives a different meaning to buried treasure...

------
hkbarton
mine bitcoin in trash

