
Missing: hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site - ca98am79
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site
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Declanomous
I mined a bunch of bitcoins in 2010. I was also experimenting with
cryptography at the time and put the wallet in one of those files that can be
decrypted into to different drives using different passwords for the key. I
subsequently put that file on a flash drive, and the key on a totally
different flash drive.

I lost the flash drive containing the key in about 2011, and I have what I
think is an image of the first flash drive, but it's impossible to tell since
I was in the habit of encrypting everything at the time.

Anyways, the first time bitcoin got up to $100 I did the math and I had
basically lost access to several hundred thousand dollars. At first I was a
little distraught, but I honestly never believed bitcoin would be worth
anything. I just mined them because I coincidentally had the right GPUs to
mine them and because I had access to "free" electricity from my school.

In effect, what happened was basically the 21st century version of "my mom
threw out my Honus Wagner rookie card." If you knew that card would be
valuable, you probably wouldn't have left it at your mom's house, or you
probably would have sold it way before the market peaked. I know I would have
sold my bitcoins wayyyy before the present day if I hadn't lost them.

I'm still mildly annoyed with myself though.

Edit: I also just remembered that the flash drive image is on an disk-spanning
filesystem that broke when I upgraded Proxmox.

~~~
observation
Did you use encryption directly, or a commercial software product to encrypt
the image?

Many commercial software versions can easily be decrypted by the company, it's
one of the services they often perform for special cases.

~~~
Declanomous
I encrypted it directly. I probably used TrueCrypt, though I honestly don't
remember all of the details. I didn't write anything down for reasons of
plausible deniability.

I was kind of fashionably into paranoia as at the time.

