Bitcoin Forum

https://protos.com/owner-of-8k-bitcoin-lost-in-landfill-threatens-to-bankrupt-local-council/

I think him lashing out at the city council and threatening to sue them doesn't make bitcoin look good. wherever his hard drive is, if it's in that trash dump i don't see how even a data recovery expert could get anything off of it. it's probably been crushed, cracked, corroded, etc. lost cause. his big mistake was throwing it away in the first place but that was his fault no one elses. he lost those bitcoin a long time ago. and they're not coming back.  :o

Regret can drive a person to the brink of obsession. He discarded it back in 2013, and as time passes, the likelihood of ever retrieving it diminishes. It might have been crushed amidst a heap of other refuse, or perhaps its components no longer function as they should.

He seems utterly fixated on that lost balance, even disregarding the ramifications of sifting through the accumulating trash.

If I were in his shoes, I too would likely harbor profound remorse for what transpired. 8K BTC is no trifling sum in today's context. It would undoubtedly impel me to act irrationally, diving headfirst into that landfill, meticulously scouring every fragment of refuse in search of it.

Well, Bitcoin has nothing to do with this. The guy would have at least stored his private keys/seed phrase in a piece of paper inside his house.
This guy is blaming someone else for his own mistake. It's like forgetting a bag with 1 million US dollars in the subway and blaming the city council for your own stupidity. Some people really lose their minds, when it comes to money. Yeah, I know it sucks to lose such big amount of money, but the only thing to go is to just try to continue living with the regret and move on with your life. Those Bitcoins are gone for good.

I really like his determination to find his lost Bitcoin because 8k worth of Bitcoin now is around 207,006,400 USD in words is (Two hundred seven million six thousand four hundred). You can see how impatience could cause someone to loos a whole lot of fortune. I still don't know why he blames the local council and want to sue them because in First place, he was the one who trashed his hard drive. He should come to reality like for over a decade now, that drive definitely would never be found and if possible it must have been crushed and damaged.


 Being a Bitcoin holder teaches us the importance of patience. Bitcoin's value has gone up and down a lot since it started, and it can be unpredictable. But, we can learn from this story. Patience is the key to being a Bitcoin holder. If you hold onto your Bitcoin and don't get worried when the market goes up and down, your 1,000 Bitcoins today might be worth a lot more, like a million in the future. We can't be sure what will happen, but staying positive and HODL onto your Bitcoin is the key to success.

Lol l thought that guy gave up on his lost bitcoins but I guess he didn't. He has no chance to win that lawsuit and what's even worse is that he is dishonest, suing them for the amount equal to the highest value of his bitcoins, like he would sell them at exactly that time and not before. Chances are, he would have sell those bitcoins (or at least majorify of it) long time before 2021.


The only one who ends up looking bad in this story is that guy, not bitcoin.

The regret of throwing away the riches drove him nuts lmao

I've read the article and my dude lost his bitcoin wallet on 2013. Obviously, a lot has changed since then. It's nearly impossible he'll be able to recover anything, not to mention the amount of work it would take to dig that much.

Most importantly, the negative environmental impact it would cause


He has no case. Better just buy BTC's again and hold.

The first thing that strikes me is that the article states:


I don't know what type of cold wallet you are referring to, as I looked up when the first HW was launched and it was in 2014 (https://www.udomain.hk/en/service/crypto-security/hardware-wallet-trezor-ledger-hong-kong).

In news of this style, the normal thing would be to talk about the PC or laptop, but as you say "cold wallet" I don't know exactly what they are referring to.


Well, that would be if justice always acted with common sense, but that is not always the case. Sometimes the most surprising sentences are issued with long legal paragraphs to argue the sense of the ruling.


I completely agree on this, and I think the most likely scenario is that he would have sold much earlier, as did most who had Bitcoin in those years.

Another day, another funny story.

Him blaming the local council for his own fault is just ridiculous.

I wonder how much the 8k bitcoin were worth at the time for the costly error.
People blaming others for their own mishaps is a weak point in our society, nothing new.

Even if he follows through with his lawsuit, there is no way he will win. I mean what judge would side with such a crazy demand. If he wants to find his wallet he should start digging fast.  ;D

This person is desperate, and while I am not an expert when it comes to the law, it does not seem as if he has any chance of winning the lawsuit, and the only one winning anything out of this will be his lawyer, now it is understandable that he is mad that he has missed what could have been the greatest opportunity of his life, but a decade has passed already and chances are he will never recover any bitcoin, and if he does not move on and learns to forget he will be really unhappy during the rest of his life.

If we are talking about the guy who threw away his hard drive, then his bitcoins were in a bitcoin core wallet, so that's not a cold storage or anything like that.

Although it's pretty crazy that he's going to take legal action against the dump, I mean for all purposes, he threw away the BTC and the hard disk must be destroyed by now, so it was his own negligence.

I think I will also be a bit butthurt, if I could have access to $206 600 000 worth of Bitcoin and if I am denied to attempt to search for it.  ::)  This is a desperate person's attempt to scare the local municipality, in the hope that they will give in to his request.

I would have made them an offer to give them 50% of the money, if they gave me access and if I find it and were able to retrieve it. Like OP said.... most hard drives would have been destroyed by this time in such a harsh environment. (rust and corrosive elements)  :P

To have self satisfaction Howells is trying to dig the trash and search for the lost hard disk. He had missed it, and soon after the same he had realised the mistake. Almost 10 years passed, soon after his request he could've been granted permission. Maybe he could've got lucky. Now its too late, even if he's allowed the chance for finding the hard disk and retrieve the information is very small.

The story about this character keeps coming back like the most persistent boomerang, so I wonder if maybe we should even open a special board for him? Of course I'm not serious ;D

---

Do you really think his potential lawsuit could hurt Bitcoin in any way? I really don't see what would be bad for Bitcoin if someone files a lawsuit against the city authorities because they don't allow him to dig through tens or hundreds of tons of garbage and thus cause an environmental disaster for the people who live near the garbage dump?


Probably so, but there is still a chance that that small piece of data that is the most important in the whole story could be saved. I think he would have given up already, but some experts think that something could be done with that hard disk in case it is found.


The information that he threw the HDD in the trash is incorrect, his partner did it, so for years everyone has been blaming poor James for something he didn't actually do.

An empty threat and I would be surprised if this ever goes to trial. I bet his legal team must be laughing behind his back but they still have to put up a case since they are getting paid whatever the outcome is.

He's able to come up with £11 million to cover the cost according to the article but he still wants to dig? Misplaced persistence.

bitcoin is not a stripper that had a bad botox reaction.. its not human it has no emotions. bitcoin doesnt have an opinion of how it looks or is treated

any drama is just temporary

It turns out that the drama continues. In addition to the fact that he lost a large amount of Bitcoins through his fault but does not want to come to terms with it, he also spends the money that he has left. Promising grandiose changes for the discovery of his disk, he looks somewhat self-confident; in Russian, there is an expression "to share the skin of an unkilled bear. " Over so many years, anything could have happened to his hard drive, from damage by water to various mixtures to anything else that the imagination can develop.
Surely we will soon see more sad news, either about his complete death from insanity or that he will be imprisoned to calm his ardor a little.

I guess the guy is very desperate to recover his HDD from the landfill. The major concern here is that the council has already claimed that they are not sure if he would be able to find his HDD or not because it may or may not be there.
Even if he finds it out magically, there are very less chances that anyone would be able to recover his keys.
The amount is too huge to be lost but he should know that when he let his bitcoins go, he didn't value them.
So the Karma has kicked his butt. He didn't value his bitcoins back then and I guess this might be the reason why he won't be able to find his coins ever.

It sounds like a broken record, but "No backup, no mercy!" has its justification. By the time the harddisk disappeared it was very likely a legacy Bitcoin-GUI (now Bitcoin Core) wallet, no HD wallet. So there were individual random private keys in a keystore of certain size in that wallet. Making backups was kind of mandatory. Having the backups on the same storage device is like no backup at all, if you consider the risk of a failure of this particular storage device. On that part the owner has to blame himself.
AFAIR by end of 2012 Bitcoin was around 10$, by midth of 2013 somewhere in the region of 15$, thus having no separate and redundant backup for a value of 80,000-120,000$$ is completely irresponsible, to say the least.

I heard years ago about this story but can't say that I know the whole truth of it. If I had a harddrive with valuable data on it, I'd put it in a clearly labeled harddrive protection container that screams "don't throw me away" to my partner or anybody else. On that part the owner has to blame himself, too, I guess.

Though harddrives have a pretty sturdy metal frame, I doubt the harddrives from the era of around 2013 and earlier were sealed against water and much pressure on the thin top cover. If moisture gets in that's going to be a problem over the long time it can do its bad on the surfaces of the drive's platters.

Then the owner would also have the problem to remember the wallet password/passphrase and that it's not an easy one, if a data recovery company manages to scrape the data from the (corroded?) platters. What if they say "Sorry, pal, we couldn't recover your data, it was too badly corroded! But you have to pay the attempted data recovery anyway." while a malevolent recovery technician indeed managed to recover the wallet and now continues to break the wallet password/passphrase.
(Yes, I know, it's not going to work out for the technician because he can't move the coins without the owner getting to spot the lie. But after more years passing, more value, this might be a risk to take and prepare for.)

James Howells is not giving up on his quest to retrieve his drive. I am astonished that he is willing to risk £11 million to fund the excavation. He should have kept this money he intended to risk instead of putting it in line to a near-impossible task. Maybe he has sponsors that are interested in the drive or he might be able to afford the cost. He intends to use equipment such as robot dogs and other Artificial intelligence tools to carry out the search and discovery. The government has refused to permit him because of the environmental hazards. Excavating landfill can lead to the emission of dangerous chemicals like methane and volatile organic compounds like Benzene and Ethylbenzene which has diverse health consequences.

The story about this guy has been circulating many years and he has yet given up his hope to rescue that disk and get his bitcoin back. It's hopeless because I am not him and I am realistic.

Years under a polluted landfill which is hazardous enough to destroy many things including hard drive. First, be realistic, it's nearly impossible to find that disk. Second, it is impossible to have a usable disk which can be restored data inside after being covered in a landfill many years.

He made many attempts and was rejected many times. Now he is mad and want to do some emotional attack but it does not make sense and won't succeed.

Landfill leachate is very toxic. (https://www.clf.org/blog/toxic-landfill-leachate-drinking-water/)

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/09/10/migmg.png

I think the part I highlighted is the funniest joke I've seen in the century, how is this guy hoping to win such a case when it clearly wasn't the fault of the local council that he lost his hard drive containing his 8k bitcoins?,
I personally think this nigga have to calm himself down because clearly, he is allowing the situation to get into his head and that is causing him to overreact unnecessarily, it is time he realized that that hard drive have either rotten and have gone deep into the ground, or the drive has been crush, melted and turned into another piece of metal..

It is rather unfortunate though, i understand that such a situation can be very hard to bear most of the time, and it could cause any body to misbehave under some circumstances, but then, like I have said before, he needs to calm himself down and face the reality, this drive is gone forever and its not the fault of the local council that this happened, he needs to forget about this drive and just move on with his life.   

I've heard this story before (about James Howells losing a hard drive with a lot of bitcoin) about trying to start excavations at the city dump. It turns out that, having failed to achieve success in negotiations with the city council, James decided to take decisive and drastic actions. We stock up on popcorn and wait for the next episode. :)

The hero of this story is obsessed with the lost bitcoin. Look, he spent 10 years of his life and what result did it lead to? Nothng. Sometimes need to let go of the past, because in pursuit of the past can lose the present. To be honest, I don't expect him to win in court or get any money from the city council. Howells will once again waste time and material resources. The same thing could have happened even if he had been allowed to dig up the dump. The disk might not be found at all, or it might turn out to be unrecoverable.

This is a good example of mind-blowing perseverance and determination, but it is completely unknown where this will lead. Either James will receive the desired wealth, or all his efforts will be in vain and having wasted all his energy trying to grasp the past, he will lose his future.

Is losing a lot of money sad? Yes, of course it is. But it's not like he lost his life savings or money he crucially needed to save a loved one or whatever. The sooner a person lets go in a situation like this, the better. But the article says it's been a decade since the loss, so he's been poisoning his life and the lives of people around him for 10 years, while that time could have been spent on doing something productive, figuring out who you want to be in life etc. By continuing the attempts to get a permission to big through the landfill despite a clear and reasonable position of the local council, he's letting this thing continue to destroy his life.

How about he finds a place to take all the garbage, and then pays the costs to move the ENTIRE landfill to that location, along with the cleanup of the existing area. He also has to pay for any damage caused buy the move and anything else involved with it.

Once it's in the new location, he can sort though it there on his own time.

-Dave

So according to you, one man saying shit to their local council in a part of a city and threatening them is going to make Bitcoin overall look bad? Your logic is way shittier than what he's doing.
No one cares about this man and his city's council. Bitcoin is perfectly fine, and can only be good or bad if something happens on the blockchain, not on roads. Understand this for now.

On the topic, the man is delusional, and doesn't deserve those 8K bitcoin back anytime soon.

He has lost his mind, he plans to bankrupt the whole town because they are not letting him try and waste more money on finding something that for sure is destroyed by now, it's a damn harddisk thrown in a rotting pile of garbage after hundreds of tracked dozers have gone over it, the chances of it being in once piece are slim, the chances of anything being readable are zero, the chances of getting the keys...common!


It was a laptop HDD, something happened to it a while after he stopped mining and he dismantled and sold a few of the pieces but not the HDD, by mistake his girlfriend as the story threw away the bag with the HDD instead of another one. There was no hard wallet or cold wallet and most importantly there is actually no proof he had them in the first place at all on that HDD other than him remembering doing some mining.


Not to mention that he claims she stopped him from mining more in 2009 because of the noise the laptop was making at night. But in the end, he not only lost the coins he lost his family as both his wife and kids left him, and now probably the whole digging plan is the only thing he has left or cares about.

He must pay all cost of the procedure even it is approved but he does not have money to pay cost. His offer is if he find that disk and get the keys, he will have money to pay the cost and local council will be shared a proportion of restored bitcoins.

It is not a good deal because local council does see risk that they will not get anything after all of this. If I am a local council member, I don't accept this offer. They are realistic but the man is not, he lost his mind. Many slim chances multiply with each other and makes his net chance is zero.

Hes mad. I doubt the hard drive will still be intact, it will not be recoverable anymore after years of being soggy under the juicy trash. He didn't yet have those BTC yet but he already act this way. He will be worse than this when he found and recovers the BTC.

It would be surprising that none of his close friends or family ever advised him to give up that hard drive and try mining again. Suing the city for his carelessness is just not the way to go. After years of him dreaming that it will be found one day made him so entitled that he has the right to dig just about wherever he may want.

Your post gave me an idea.

Why should James conflict with the city council in attempts to obtain what is prohibited? In this case, it is precisely what is prohibited from the point of view of their legislation and harm to the environment. Why dig through a mountain of garbage, move it somewhere, just for the sake of one hard drive? Ok. James wants to get his disk/ bitcoins, but he may change his approach in negotiations with the city council. The tactic of threatening to bankrupt them, sue them is an aggressive policy that breeds evil and destructive actions. Why shouldn't James offer a different solution? For example, should recycle all this garbage? As I understand it, he found investors willing to allocate money to find a hard drive. So let them use this money to build a waste processing plant and clean out a landfill in search of a hard drive, clean up the surrounding area, not harm nature, obtain raw materials for recycling, and so on. What is the problem? What's the problem with agreeing win-win? James will get what he wants, the city council will solve the landfill problem with the help of other people’s investments, the city residents will get a clean area and a solution to the garbage problem. Even if the disk or bitcoins is not found, then everyone will win. Even James, who may not get his btc, but will become a local hero in the eyes of his fellow citizens. Perhaps even investors will make some profit from the sale of secondary raw materials for waste processing and the built processing plant, which can be used in the future, because there will already be a client in the form of this city.

I understand that in reality everything will be more difficult to organize and arrange, but instead of conflicts, why not try to come to an agreement in the most beneficial way for each party?

If story had developed according to this scenario, then instead of shouting that bitcoin is harming the surrounding nature, we would have heard that bitcoin is helping nature, which man has polluted with his activities, to become cleaner. Why not a newspaper headline?

He should give up and admit "defeat". Regret is a difficult thing to live with, but he should just accept that he made a mistake, and nobody is above mistake. If he needs therapy to deal with then he should see a licensed therapist to help me through the process.  But making bitcoin look bad is something that the community will not accept at all.

It is even possible that if he had put in this much effort that he had put in in looking for the drive, into accumulating bitcoin through other means he probably would have gotten the 8k bitcoin. He must deal with himself and not with the local council.

.
Looking at this statement shown above, which I got from the link OP provided, I must say it clearly shows that neither was James Bitcoin hardware wallet stolen or rather misplaced in the council's premises, for him to be asking for such a huge sum of money. But was accidentally thrown into the trash bin a whole 10yrs ago and, which somebody is to be blamed for that, as nobody knew that item will be worth millions of dollars today. So for me I will only advise he accept the responsibility of his lost and move on, because even if a court permit is been granted to kick-start his search for his lost Bitcoin hardware wallet, I doubt if he has any chance of recovery it. Or even if he does, it should be damaged by now.

We do not know for sure whether those BTC exist or not, but I think James Howells has at least some hope to count on. I mean, why is the council not allowing him to dig the landfill? It seems doubtful, but let's just not jump to conclusions for now and wait to see what happens next. Now James Howells will sue them, asking for £446 million ($557 million). I mean, the chances of victory are lower, but still.

Maybe he will get some chance of digging up there. And what if he found his hard drive?Then, as you (the OP) asked, how could a data recovery expert recover something out of it? The point is, it's been a decade, and James is still hoping for it to be in healthy condition. I mean, if the device is not burned to ashes or melted, then I think there will be some chance of recovering the data from it.

At least giving it a try is better than sitting without hope.

He suing the city council does not have any good or bad impact on the image of Bitcoin; instead, if those BTC are found, there will be more BTC in circulation. This man made the biggest mistake of his life, and now he is fighting for it. That's the best he can do right now, but one thing confuses me: if the owner of the HDD is offering 10% to the CC, then why is the CC not allowing him to do digging?

I think they must have become greedy and thought of digging by themselves. I do not know; I am just making an assumption. There could be any number of possibilities. But things seem not to be as straight as they are trying to make them.

Recovering data from HDDs depends on their health. If it still has something in it from which a data recovery expert could fetch something, then keep the amount in mind. I can bet they will make sure to get something out of it. One more thing: James must have some proof to show that those wallets belong to him. He must need the.dat file containing the key to access the funds. Let's hope he finds what he's looking for.

This guy doesn’t value Bitcoin before that’s why he throw it away. He is just making a fuss that his Bitcoin is important to him now that price is already high. It’s his own judgement by treating Bitcoin useless by the time he throw his hard drive.

I believe no one view this guy opinion seriously because we all know that he is the one to blame on his loss. He should backup his private key properly if he really give importance to his Bitcoin that time.

I think this guy was done looking for his long lost hard drive knowing that he had dumped it himself not someone else.

Don't know how this person can sue their local council on fault or negligence on their part but this seems quite lengthy and the owner doesn't want to just give up with this long effort, even if they keep digging up the whole dumpster location and sorting it out themselves what is it likely to find? In theory it doesn't make sense that it will be recovered again maybe the Hard Drive will be damaged and corroded in the other pile.

Does anyone know the address of the lost wallet? Although this is not important. :D

He trashed the wallet backup 10 years ago now threatening to sue the authority for following the orders that is what they are supposed to do.

It doesn't make Bitcoin bad, the person himself alone.

But many of the others pointed out it could be a made-up story and trying to get some money via such threats or coming to some kind of deal to not disrespect the other party here.

Every day with a different funny story, like, what the heck is the guy even thinking, suing Newport City Council (NCC), and what does he plan to achieve? Even if he succeeds with his plan to finally press a charge, will he win the chase, or does he think the local council will just admit defeat like that?

Don't he also look at it the other way round; That what if he take this case to court since he want to press charges, and the court finally grant him an order to stop the ongoing construction in the said location, and he is being permitted to search the area and make some digging as he have claim he can use that process to fine his lost hardrive, and at the end of the day he did not even see the cover or anything that will look like the hard drive, in their, if they even happen to see the hardrive on the process of the digging it might have been damaged through the machine that might be used that's if it will even be found, and after all this process, if the Newport City Council (NCC) decides to file a case on him and charge him for damages that might occur during his search do he think he can be able to escape such charges? 
 
Some people just need to run some rethinks over some things before they can take a certain decision and push it further. All I will say is that they just have some random bad legal adviser.

Wow I am surprised he is still at it. I remember reading about this years ago and basically knew back then that it was gone forever.

When you throw away your garage, it’s not tracked where it’s dumped exactly. Maybe some site and some corner but exact location is never logged. So it’s impossible to know where it is especially when there is also other peoples garbage in that site and they pour new garbage over the old and seal it with a wrap and then more garage over that wrap.

And even if they found it, the data would be irrecoverable. Because due to the environmental chemicals it would be completely destroyed.

         -   8000 bitcoins—that's a lot of money. Just because I was cleaning the old office and spilled the hard drive. Why does the person who cleaned or fixed the office know nothing about Bitcoin? I just can't figure it out, or does the owner of the office not know that there is something hidden in a hard drive worth 8000 bitcoins?

It just makes me think: Did the person who put 8000 bitcoins in the hard drive that day know that the office would be cleaned? Obviously he didn't know, according to the article given, and maybe he only remembered when he put it on the hard drive in the office when it was finished cleaning. It's a terrible incident, and it's really sad. Wasn't the hard drive recovered from the trash?

If he manages to recover it for sure, it is already submerged in water, the soil is already inside, and rust takes place, which is impossible to recover no matter how much he pays to recover it. It is just funny, though, that it was his mistake, and now he is blaming others for not allowing him to check the landfill. For sure, he has been sleepless for a couple of months now, always thinking of it, which is just wasting his effort. It is better to move on right now and learn from those hard mistakes, we can't do anything now, and that bitcoin is already lost forever.

That man then has a double reason to be sorry for not remaining single in his life, because not only would he not have become a victim of his wife rummaging through drawers and throwing things in the trash, but he would also have more than those 8000 BTC if she hadn't objected to him because of computer noise ::)

If nothing else, he will become an expert in waste disposal and its impact on the environment :)

Well, it's definitely a tough situation for him. But hey, let's hope this serves as a valuable lesson for everyone else to back up their crypto wallets! Can't rely on trash dumps for safekeeping, that's for sure.

It's normal for someone to underestimate something that looks worthless. The story proves that he did not think Bitcoin would be very expensive and even got its highest price at $69k. Maybe more stories like that haven't been published so we don't know.

Yes, it is a valuable lesson for us not to underestimate something that seems worthless. And the most important thing is that we can maintain and back up everything related to Bitcoin, including passwords or whatever. That way, we won't worry if we can't open the wallet on the hard disk because we can open it elsewhere.

If he could get the hard disk, he probably wouldn't be able to access it because it was already in the trash piles. Who knows how it ends but maybe he won't be allowed to rummage through the trash just to find the hard disk.

It makes me smile every time I try to imagine how he is going to search for that disk drive. How the hell he is going to find it? With metal detector? With a huge comb and search in every pile of garbage? By building a sort machine and examining manually every single metal or aluminium piece of trash ? The local bumps have already found his disk drive and sold it on a yard sale for few bucks, or have destroyed it and gave parts to metal collection point.

P.S. that junk yard was a perfect place to "hold bitcoin" :D Excellent hardware-trash wallet :D

So after how many years this dude suddenly remember his 8k bitcoin stack somewhere and missing due to his own carelessness, if Bitcoin was not worth this fortune that it is now will he have taught of even starting up all this drama right from day one. I believe one of the reason which could be driving him this crazy is as a result of him always running some calculations of how much wealthy he could have been if he have had those bitcoins with him, forgetting the fact that he could have also spent those bitcoins back then when it first hits its first figures which we shouldn’t have seen any of this drama again on the internet. But this guy really don’t know when to say it’s okay and accept the fact that those bitcoins are lost forever and there is no means or mechanism used that could get them back.

I guess it serves not only as a cautionary tale in personal responsibility, but also a lesson to be careful about who you allow into your life.  It's surprising what a momentous impact they can have if you aren't both on the same page when it comes to money.

Choose your significant others carefully.

Wait what? People are getting creative day by day to prove that they are an idiot. How is he blaming the local council for his lost Bitcoins? Isn't he the one who threw it away without making any actual backup of that thing? And how is he going to prove that he actually lost 8k Bitcoins if he does not have any access to that wallet whatsoever? How stupid can he be?

And why are people covering such news knowing this is all BS? How is one supposed to dig out years-old hard drives buried under all that trash? These people never stop to amaze me. This is pure entertainment. You can not blame someone when you are the one at fault. How any of this make sense?

This just increases the number of questions in your mind. LOL

While I do understand that 8,000 BTCs is a lot of money (like a lot), still, requesting for the City Council to dig up a site may cause environmental effects that can potentially harm others. His mistake of throwing the hard-drive should be construed as negligence on his part for doing such thing. He just cannot blame the government for refusing to dig up on the site on the very same accident he did to himself.

This is just a desperate attempt to at least feel sorry for himself. Assuming that they indeed recover the drive, there is no guarantee that it may work; nor the drive containing all the files in a recoverable position.

Bro is Sisyphus but in reverse lol. He knows deep in his heart of hearts that the ordeal was an impossible one, and even if he were able to claim the hard drive, it doesn't really mean anything since for sure the data is already corrupted from all the rust and stuff that it must've collected over the years. It's honestly just depressing at this point to receive updates from him since he's basically what we don't want to be—Someone who's stuck up on his past, so much that he's making stupid and belligerent acts in the name of bitcoin.

He could've worked his way out of 8000 bitcoins with the time that he's had since 2016, what is he doing instead? Spend unnecessary amount of money over fruitless work.

I don't think there is any way he can get his Bitcoin back since he lost the hardware many years ago. He should have look for a way to get the hard drive when the scene was still early. Even though he don't want them to carry out work in the site, how does he think that he will be able to find the hard drive. Even though the hard drive is found, if not burnt, he might not still be able to get his Bitcoin because it would have been damaged and not able to recover the files that are there. I see this as a complain that can not yield any legal success because he can not blame anyone for his lost.

I don't agree.
He lost something and is desperately trying to get it back.

If that was a ring made f gold and not a drive with bitcoin, would that make gold look bad? Your approach is very strange.

He really wanted to do something good, he offered to share the coins with the council and they still did not allow him to look for it. I feel like he's overreacting, but his anger is understandable because he's been hitting a wall for years.

He is just trying to look for someone to blame, a scapegoat to his lost bitcoins that's why he had to do something. But I doubt that it will affect bitcoin negatively, on the contrary, it might highlight bitcoin again. And for those holders, they will really have to protect it at all cost and that be the one guy that will be desperate to search for it because of his stupidity and he should be enjoying it right now as a millionaire. Unfortunately he had to do everything to the point that he has to look for someone to blame including the city council which has nothing to do with BTC.

I agree, but he wants to try, why are they denying him the right to look for it?


But he didn't. What's done is done, but he knew about it years ago and wanted to try then but was denied.


Doesn't matter, let him try. He's got a special company willing to do the job.

The thing is he is the one who trash his hard drive not the people who are just doing their work. He need to be reminded that we should be held accountable for the things that we are the one who have done that decision. Even he got the best lawyer in the world he will not win this case because he is the one who initiate it. He are being desperate to something and blame other people, it is understandable that losing bitcoin is very hard and painful but blaming to someone is not the right action.

he could offer to give them 100% of the money they're just not interested. apparently he doesn't get that.

you would think. but it's hard to say. for that amount of money, people with very high tech equipment would probably be willing to take a shot at reading off the data. we're talking electron microscope stuff. but he has to get the hard drive first.... :o

This guy have been running for it for long time. The hard drive is very expensive. Atleast the corporation/council could arrange for the search and if they find it, further negotiations can be done. This will surely make way and mutually benefit. Its a big work that could last for years, and any decisions taken at the earliest seems to be good.

Here we can't blame anyone. Just on losing fee dollars worth bitcoin we find it difficult to digest and look for all the ways to get it back. 8000BTC is very big and the same getting added to the network from the idle state will have changes in the market as well. According to me, this will be successful only if any of the billionaire gets into the problem.

well, bitcoiners shouldn't be tying up government organizations wasting taxpayer dollars but this guy seems like he's been pestering that city council for a long time. people don't like people like that. he probably caused peoples' taxes to go up and if he wins this lawsuit they definitely will!



good example of someone that lives in the past....no one wants him to get his bitcoin back except HIM.  :o (bitcoiners certainly don't because that would make their bitcoins worth less.)

Talk about destroying your life for 8000BTC !

No amount of money is ever worth obsessing over, even if you held it in your hand at one point.

But anyway, running down the city council at the determent of the taxpayers living there is a pretty dick move. Now everyone knows who this guy is, and whose going to claim that he won't get scam letters and extortion if he ever recovers those BTC?

story twist: in 2045, bitcoin goes into a price slump down to $1 and the city council finally agrees to let him search for his hard drive but he has to cover the costs...

people see people acting a certain way and think all bitcoin people are like that. and they don't want to be like that. losing their money and crying like a baby about it...

they probably don't even know what bitcoin is. and all they care about is making sure that landfill doesn't get messed up. isn't that reasonable?

i don't want him to ever be allowed onto that landfill. under any circumstances. :o


apparently landfills keep records of where they dumped on what dates so if that's the case they might be able to narrow his hard drive down to a particular zone and then figure out how deep it is based on how many dumps happened on top of it since then. that's for sophistocated landfills. but no one really knows if his hard drive ever made it that far. maybe it never even existed at all. it probably did but i wouldn't know if it made it to the landfill.

The more I think about it this guy's only hope for sanity is some sort of total amnesia. As far as I remember his story he was very early denied to search for his harddrive at times where it would've been quite likely to find the device intact, at least not yet corroded. With every year of time passed chances grow higher that corrosion destroys data and recovery of those diminishes.

To my knowledge (sorry, no sources) he got investors who gamble for their share of the 8k BTC treasure. Despite all odds there are serious trust issues if he were allowed to search the landfill. Everyone participating in the search likely knows what treasure might be left stored in the search item. Doing all by machines and today's common buzzwords only sounds like sci-fi and you don't want to miss your opportunity, you've got likely only one chance. Yada, yada, yada...

And yes, if he would find the device, could have the data restaured, he'd be such an exposed known person that he'd likely be subject to worse or worst things even if he could keep only a half, third or quarter of the treasure after paying out his investors.

What a sad life's story. Total amnesia and relocation is his only rescue, I guess.

They have a good and valid reason to turn down the request for one the council stated it's like looking for a needle in a haystack without guarantee of finding it


And second Even if he takes it to court the court will favor the council because of the possible harm and he may end up being charged by the city council because of the harm.

James Howells must have anticipated that Bitcoin could reach $1 million in a few years and he needs to take action now but I doubt if he can do that, he will have to regret his action of throwing his hard drive ten years ago for the rest of his life. 

If it's really been a long time since they threw the hard drive away, then there are no chances of finding it at all  :-[

Even if there is, it's going to be a very slim chance, like looking for a pin in a river, where do you even start? It's nobody's fault they threw it away. This should serve as a lesson to others, and they should learn to keep their properties right. I have some old drives I am not using, but I still kept them because I might need them. You only throw something away when you're hundred percent it's useless.

I think suing is not the solution on this because win or lose that HDD won't appear when the judge has to give his or her final decision. Let me just say he is just so unlucky that he threw away his fortune.

his actions were like a child whining about something he lost and scolding his parents for the mistakes he had made. he should be aware that the actions he took were very stupid and he should be embarrassed to sue the local council because of his own mistakes.

instead of whining for these 10 years, why doesn't he invest in bitcoin again? in fact, if he invested in bitcoin in the past 5 years he should be able to make quite a profit and he wouldn't need to embarrass himself in public. very stupid.

How does this make bitcoin look bad in any way shape or form? I don't think this makes bitcoin look bad personally.  This story though has been a common tale over the years. I feel like I'm hearing stories like this at least several times a year.

I feel bad for the guy, but be more careful with your valuable assets! I can understand too why the city council is not allowing him to go search for it.

I feel for the dude but honestly I am not sorry for him. There's an adage that says never make the same mistake twice. The mistake he made some years ago, he's about repeating it the second time. He's in this ugly situation because he was impatient and couldn't hold on to his Bitcoin. So lashing out and threatening to sue the local council is not the best approach, should keep waiting and hope that he's given approval to excavate the land. If he does go ahead with the lawsuit I wonder what will be the legal ground... Obstruction of accessing personal belonging? I'm sure he's not going to win.

Some people lose their minds if they earn more money and they cannot think of what he is doing right or wrong. I would not be doing such stupidity to store such a big fund of Bitcoin in a single wallet If I stored it then I would be very careful about my wallet and yeah I would put it in a safe for security purposes so that nobody can touch or steal it.
He needs to be going onwards and don't think about the loss. You have a family and you have to start something other instead of sitting in a corner and crying for your lost Bitcoin.

I agree, it's going to destroy him, unless he gets some psychiatric help. His life must be one big regret. I doubt that he can live a normal life and enjoy it unless he deals with this loss and moves on.


Is that your landfill? Why would you care about some random guy digging in a pile of garbage somewhere? I feel like everybody should be allowed to do these things as long as they aren't making other people's lives harder. Finding the drive could make some people happy, so why not allow them to do what they want with their lives.

Since he was the one who lost the hard-drive, he wouldn't need to sue anyone in the court because the mistake was from him. And if the waste (garbage) packers saw the device and picked they would not know that such amount of bitcoins were inside or condemn iron picker has taken it, so since he didn't know who really picked it there is no way he can just sue the council. And since he lost it for a very long time, they have spoiled it unless the person is using it to store his personal information (data). And because of all these over excitements, some people decided not to over rich and over poor but just decided to be in the middle. When someone get money suddenly, with the over excitement at the time of the receiving the money, high blood pressure killed them. And I believe he did the mistake because he was excited at that time.

Yeah, I don't admire him, and even if I harboured some sympathy, it's all gone when he did this (if true).

Ten years is a lot of time. I hope he comes to terms with it, hope he moves on, realises he's lost a good part of his youth. No need to waste more. Hire a company, pay them, get a move on.

Easier said than done, of course, I'd probably have wasted years doing what he did.

it's the public's landfill, not his.

maybe other people lost things they don't want someone else digging up. this guy would just be having free reign over everybody's trash.

but that's just the point, it makes everyone's lives harder. and for no good reason. except to make one man happy? i dont think that's a good enough reason why they should dig up a bunch of trash and maybe expose the public to a bunch of toxins that could get released into the air or water.

there has to be a limit on that though. you can't just let people go digging up landfills looking for stuff.

If you look at how long the bitcoin wallet has been missing, I think OP's words are very correct. As you can imagine, this person's wallet/hard disk was lost in 2013, and until now in 2023 the hard disk has not been found. So if the hard disk ends up in a landfill, there are many possibilities that could happen. It's like the hard disk is damaged and its shape is no longer intact, because it was crushed by the existing rubbish. Or someone has found the hard disk and perhaps kept the hard disk. So in essence, looking at all these factors, the chances of finding a hard disk containing his Bitcoin wallet are very, very small.

But in reality, Howell has not given up looking for the hard disk containing his bitcoin assets. Because I can understand this, because you can imagine, if the bitcoins were not lost and sold when the bitcoin price reached ATH several years ago. Of course James Howel was already a very rich man. However, this really failed and James might have to end up daydreaming and would definitely be haunted by the shadow of his success if the bitcoins he had were not lost. So, in my personal opinion, the best way to do it right now is to release those lost bitcoins.

Even though the reality is bitter, a way out still needs to be taken.
Because don't let James get sick and that would be more dangerous than losing bitcoin.

i wonder if Mr. Howell knows any of the bitcoin ADDRESSES. That would certainly help build sympathy to his case. but i doubt he does. but if it's really 8000 bitcoin it shouldn't be too hard to find an old bitcoin address with an untouched balance of 8000 bitcoins.

I think you're on to something here. At the very least, maybe he could get some kind of "mild" lobotomy that would prevent him from continuing to care so much about what happened.  :D  But you know, Laszlo "the Pizza Guy" seems to have made peace with what he did over the years. At least he got a couple of pizzas out of the deal.


Or even worse, that it can't be found because its not even there, or where they thought it was.


Seems like an important piece of the puzzle, so I looked it up, and indeed there is such an address (https://thenationview.com/cryptocurrency/67480.html) that appears to belong to him:

https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/BTC/198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5qkfy4g3Hi

I should send it some Rare Pepes  :D

Is it still possible to recover or retrieve the hard drive that was thrown in the trash? If I think about 8000 bitcoins just lost because they were thrown in the trash, it hurts the bangs a bit too much, to be honest. To this day, I still think that the person who fixed the office had no idea, and then the person who cleaned it seemed to have no idea that there was Bitcoin on the hard drive. But anyway, let's move on to this situation; we can't go back to the past, and I hope this becomes a lesson learned for them because the value of Bitcoin is not really a joke, to be honest.

It is unlikely to have gone to landfill. I belive they scan the tgrash to remove metal, and that goes to the scrappie. Failing that, some of the stuff that goes to the tip gets resold for reuse. So the drive could have been reformated and strill running in a refurbished pc. If I lived in Wales, I'd be checking my drives as I have got a lot of second hand ones.

I expect that there is a possibility to recover data from the hard drive even if it has been severely damaged. I believe that there is a technology that allows data to be recovered in such cases, but it is very expensive.

With such a large amount of Bitcoin on the hard drive, it is certain that this unlucky person would not mind paying hefty additional costs to recover his Bitcoin.

This guy needs to give up, it’s his own stupid fault. He threw it out years ago, like the OP said it’s probably totally destroyed. Even if isn’t, he can pay himself to exhume no doubt thousands of tonnes of shit pressed deep into the earth to try & find it. I don’t see how this anybody else’s fault or responsibility except his.

When you read only the first post and the title, you can write nonsense without even realizing it - because how many times does it have to be repeated that it was not he who threw the HDD in the trash, but his partner at the time. Commenting without knowing some basic facts is sometimes more stupid than what happened to that poor guy.

---

In addition, no one mentioned that James claims that his HDD also contains an IP address from Satoshi and that he was one of the first six people mining at the time. And now we have to believe that Satoshi was so reckless as to reveal his real IP address - to me, that information seemed just like an attempt for James to attract even more attention and maybe charge for a few more interviews.

Bro has lost it completely. My story goes to 2010 when I first had the opportunity to buy 200 BTC for $20 and I'm doing okay over here where I'm at just barely paying all my bills and entertainment lol. Now I have a like .1 BTC total lol. Such is life. My plan is to just earn more by means of forming a company that only accepts crypto, but I've never really had a start up so thank God we have AI lol

I noticed that this case is still a thing and looked it up and yes it is the Howell's case. I wonder if this really makes still sense to go after those Bitcoin. We are talking about a hard drive that has been in a giant hill of trash for years now.

If I understand correctly, he has been trying it since 2013/14 (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/15/uk-man-makes-last-ditch-effort-to-recover-lost-bitcoin-hard-drive.html)(?), but I don't quite get the council's reasoning here. What is the point of not letting him search for it when they can first come up with a set of requirements that he must adhere to?

I agree that the chances are basically zero and he might be as well off playing the lottery instead (although it is tough to find one that pays that much money for the jackpot win :D). But I also get why he is trying so hard. It must be a nightmare. Though there was a report about another guy who lost 7,002 Bitcoin because he forgot the password for his hard drive. The one good thing about it is that some of the hard drives really seem to be safe places and nobody could crack them.

Which means he also pays for it in taxes, right? I'd say if he wants to dive in a pile of garbage, let him. Plenty of people do it without asking.



When you throw something away you forfeit your privacy anyway. That's why we have shredders and that's why we wipe drives before throwing them away.


How does he make your life harder? There are people digging through trash in various parts of the world as we speak. Do you think that if any toxic materials are stored there, they won't get into water or air at some point in time? The council could demand he follows safety protocols, or even recycles part of the stuff he goes through and actually make the place a bit tidier.


The government does that from time to time to compact everything and make room for new deliveries. What's wrong with allowing a private company to do the same?
Also, this is an exceptional situation because he's willing to pay for it.

The guy is probably never going to let it go, he cannot accept that he made a huge mistake by throwing those coins away, however he seems to think he could have hundreds of millions on his bank account, but it does not seem as if he has ever stopped to think what he could have done if he had not mistakenly thrown away that hard drive, and it is incredibly unlikely he will still have that bitcoin, and it is likely he would have sold his coins for a low price, and instead he will just be mad that he sold his coins for a few hundred dollars a piece.

To watch this guy from way back then become this husk of a desperate man is just depressing. Way back then you'd really root for him, especially since we love impossible stories and he's pretty determined to find his lost treasures and earn back his fortune. Nowadays you can't root for him anymore. He's exhausted all efforts, time, and money for an impossible task that has spanned years already. We all know it's better for him to just quit and move on with his life so he can I don't know, earn his lost coins in a more established way instead of looking for something that is already gone forever, but due to sunk cost fallacy you can't make this guy relent.

This story will either end with him getting arrested for it or dying, or him actually finding his hard drive which is even more impossible. I'm pretty sure of that.

Again this guy? Again?! That hard disk is lost forever, it's now been 10 years, it could be under tons of trash of even completely destroyed. I don't understand how he can sue the city for not giving him the permit to do whatever he wants like he owns the place. It's just ridiculous what he is doing, just get over it, you will never get those bitcoins back, focus on your current life instead of being stuck in the past.

because it's not for the greater good  it's not helping anybody except possibly him. thats the only reason he's doing it is to help himself not help anyone else.

yeah but it's not worth it to city council. so he can't do it.

It's possible that someone pushed him not to give up on getting his hard drive containing Bitcoin at any cost, I'm not on the side of the city council but they can use all kinds of laws and regulations that apply in the city to fight the demands of the man who lost the hard drive. 10 years is quite a long time to be able to find the lost hard drive, especially if the city has an automated waste recycling facility then the chance of getting the hard drive back from the man is around 0.0009%

what if city council has been rummaging through the trash dump for years trying to get that guys bitcoin? it wouldn't suprise me if someone had taken a quick peak here and there just to see if there was some western digital hard drive lying around.

i think he might have made a mistake by admitting that he lost something valuable. better if he would have said he lost a sentimental piece of jewelry that some long lost relative gave him years ago and he doesn't know if he can go on if they can't help him recover it. at leas that way he might get some symptathy. but no one feels sorry for him about his bitcoin!

Am I the owner of all the rubbish I have thrown on the dump ? I am not. Neither is he. The the local council or whoever finds it, is the owner.

 

It's not the first time I've heard about this guy's HDD. It happened over 10 years ago; let it go; there's no chance of it ever being found, and even if we suppose that it is found, it certainly won't be functioning after being in a landfill for so long. It's purely his fault for throwing it away. My only guess is that he knows that there's no chance of recovering his HDD but is hoping that he can yield some money by suing the local council; perhaps some lawyer is leading his case in hopes of gaining some money from them. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if he's just lying in order to gain publicity and also attempt to earn money from this story.

The case is really complicated. But the local council has nothing to do because it's not their duty to secure someone else's bitcoin or device. Even the person who files a case won't gain from such a case. And after 10 years, I don't feel it's possible to recover his bitcoin, even if he were able to find his hard drive. Even the person won't prove he really holds 8K bitcoins on his hard drive. And finally, it's hard to identify where it is currently.

He's just out of his mind and it doesn't make Bitcoin look bad because it's not fault of Bitcoin that they were lost but it was the fault of that person who didn't took care of his Bitcoin. Bitcoin still looks good and it will remain looking good forever.




That person wasn't smart enough to save his private key/pass phrase and wallet details on paper or somewhere safe because hard drive is the worst medium to save your keys and if someone does that then that person isn't aware about hard drive failures. He lost the Bitcoin because of his own stupidity and now he's blaming city council for his loss. I feel bad for him but it was his own fault which made him lose all his Bitcoin holdings.

On the time that Bitcoin was just into its early years then only a few did make out have that trust on investing into it without even having those kind of hopes or insights about becoming big in the near future and on the time comes that Bitcoin did hit up those bull run prices or new all time highs then for sure it did spark out and make those early adopters to find their Bitcoin stash on which this one included for course. No one had ever been that believing that Bitcoin would really come that far and it would really be just that normal that you would really be finding where those coins been hiding and been stored and we know that on that time which only a few do mind about their coins because it was cheap but on the time that it did make out some huge movement then this is where
stash-digging happens.

This would be a good read up in talks about lost wallets.
https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/lost-wallets/

You could really be able to say on how such a waste on losing those coins which value over billions of dollars but well there's nothing we can
do about it since it is really that lost and floating in the void forever.

I wonder if he has the public key for the address?, or were they stored on one address or more?

Knowing the public key, he could at least have some hope, not that knowing public key could do magic, but at least we have some ideas which could be used to solve for private key. Of course if he is willing to spend money to hire a professional programmer to code the said ideas into an application/ tool.
Doing this is more practical than searching garbage, the hard drive is damaged by now due to humidity

I assume he has the private key. Otherwise he can’t be sure the funds weren’t already found and spent by someone else. Don’t kid yourself though, even with the public key there is no magic he can work and no additional hope that he would ever be able to get control of that lost Bitcoin ever again. He could look at it though.

Well, I do not criticize any of  the protagonists of the news, man!, they are not your bitcoins and you have the nerve to throw out that "brave" comment, probably to win applause.

Anyway, the city council has the It has the power over the garbage by law, so, They do not want to give in to the idea because it creates a precedent for an ordinary citizen who does not belong to  government
Then, bitcoin thing is the least important, perhaps a precedent is created and anyone will want to take out of the trash what they forget.

think about it. he was so careless he didn't even backup that one hard drive. that means he didn't store anything. no private keys so probably nothing else either. who is dumb enough to store their public keys but not their private ones. no one. he probably never even used bitcoin for anything either. so unlikely he would have even concerned himself with his actual addresses. sounds like he just mined those bitcoin and forgot all about it. like it was some worthless thing.

Well, this is one example of someone who can't move on from his lack of consciousness regarding Bitcoin's old era, he needs to understand that what happened is part of the puzzle that has already been completed and he just needs to close his eyes and move on. everyone from that era who didn't take much seriously about taking care of their bitcoins has already moved on and none of them really care about what happened but they just continue to live their lives and took that experience as a lesson, while this guy has been digging all these years but didn't find anything at all and now he turns against the local council.

What is there to understand on the part of the council? Well, a person shouldn’t dig through garbage. You never know what could happen to him. They are trying to protect him from the senseless search for an “artifact”. At landfills there is a chance of picking up some kind of bacilli, which will lead to an epidemic or something like that. Still, there are some concerns. It is quite reasonable to restrict people from visiting such sites even if they have all the permits.
It's time for this guy to accept this fate of such an unbearable loss and move on with his life. This is a much better option than trying to find a needle in a haystack.

just imagine if once he runs out of options with the city council and the lawsuit he turns to the bitcoin community and asks them for donations to get him his 8000 bitcoin back. i'd be surprised if anyone gave him anything.

9 years ago he thought he had mined 7500 BTC He obviously didn't know the Blockchain address. At the time he also thought that the bitcoins are stored in the wallet.dat file on the hard drive.

https://youtu.be/0tMXLDVpPs8?t=1

1 year ago he has found the Blockchain address (visible in the video) and knows he mined 8000 BTC back in 2009

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZr97E5PgzQ&t=250s

He just tried it out for fun a couple of months, got 8000 BTC and thought nothing more about it. No one did, it was just a trial period, early on in 2009.

It is irrelevant if anyone outside the council were to decide to donate funds to finance the search for the hard drive. The guy wouldn't get access to the landfill. This is what the problem is all about.

@fruktik while I agree with most of what you said, the reasons why the council would not want the garbage to be dug through could vary quite a lot! :P I am really not sure if this


is their biggest concern :D Who knows who is hiding corpses there. And who knows if they didn't already try secretly to find it themselves. I think a quarter billion dollars makes people come up with quite wild ideas. But it also depends what size the landfill is. If it's one of those local little things, it doesn't even have to be that big. But there are also huge landfills where the saying the needle in the hay would probably still be an understatement.

But I agree with you that the hard drive must be dead by now. No way it remained dry or unaffected for almost a decade? And you are also right because why would it even still be there after such a long time? Didn't give that a second thought. But that's why I said they should have potentially said yes when he first reached out (if all the info provided in the articles is true).

so he basically admitted that he is the one that threw his hard drive away at the trashdump. no one to blame but himself.

future update: he applies undercover for a job at the landfill and on his breaks he drives around one of those big machines trying to dig up his hard drive.

i'll have to watch that 2nd video you linked to but i still confuse why he thought his bitcoin was on his new computer. especially since he switched hard drives.  :o

I don't usually open any external links in posts, but since you have much intel on this guy than anyone else around here, why don't you tell us how exactly did he find his address? Did he transfer block rewards from several addresses to that one address? Is the address holding 8000 coins a virgin address or has it's public key revealed?

If the transfer happened in 2009, 2010, then the public key should be known since pay to public key was the norm back then, could you let us have it or do we need to pause the video and find it ourselves?

I am willing to work on it for 50%, also note that 99.999999% I will die before cracking a 256 bit key.😅  but it never hurts to have hope and try the best we can, I mean  I would say  4000 bitcoins somehow has the power of raising the dead if I was an atheist. Lol.

He just went here https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-dormant_5y-bitcoin-addresses.html

There was no 7500 BTC address, so it had to be the 8000 BTC address from 2009, the year he knew he had tried it out.

I am sure many including himself have tried to find the private key corresponding to the address. The wallet.dat file that is on the hard drive that he threw away at the trashdump, contains the private key.

I watched it until the 5:41nd minutes (https://youtu.be/cZr97E5PgzQ?si=R9-ZgNuZVHX8omnn&t=341), it seems like the garbage dump also has a shredder. Aren't bitcoin owner also thinking that the HD wallets ended up in that machine a long time ago? The supervisory council's rejection may have known that this man's proposal was a waste of work to do besides causing detrimental effects.

obviously with no success which shouldn't be suprising. bitcoin was designed to prevent exactly that from happening.

one way they could fix it is if the bitcoin community voted in favor of restoring his bitcoin balance to a new address and we just edited the blockchain to reflect that. that would take the cooperation of miners. but i think the main objection most people would have to that is they dont want more bitcoins in circulation because their bitcoins then have less value...

The guy from this news is humiliated more and more, although he probably guesses that he will never get his eight thousand bitcoins back. He needs to accept this fact and start living without thinking about it, starting everything from scratch. Even if he finds this disk, but most likely the condition of the disk drive will be unsatisfactory for operation. Most likely there is an ide hdd, but even if it were sata, the disk can not only be irretrievably damaged by external influences, but if it was lying on the street, then humidity and temperatures finally finished crush this ide.

in that video he was talking about how they were going to be "giving back" with some charitable donation plan once they recovered his bitcoin. i wonder if he would be so charitable if he didn't have to though. because the more money he gives away the more people would maybe support his ideas to dig up that hard drive...

8000 x 25,000 = 200,000,000 if it costs 4 million to search for it he needs to give the town 8,000,000 upfront and the town  turns a 4,000,000 profit zero questions asked.

He does not have that money so he needs a backer. The backer puts up the 8,000,000

if the money is found and recover the backer gets ½

I doubt he ever gets the backer and its a lost cause. 

At this point it's clear that he's just trying to find a way to make some money because he knows he will never find that hard disk. Of course it's impossible to know if this is his idea or his lawyer's, anyway at first one could sympathize with his situation, now he's just being pathetic threatening to sue and bankrupt his own small town.

I can assure you, there will be no community voting no miners agreement, it's not like he was active on "forum" for years using his address, everyone knowing him etc, some random person coming here claiming he owns some address is not enough, I also checked that address containing 8000 coins, in 2009 first transaction was  pay to public key hash using rmd160 hash, and since it has no outputs, he should forget about it, end of story. Imagine the face of faketoshi when he hears about someone restoring 8000 coins by talking with community and miners, lol

i don't know i thought his story was well known from long time ago. it's been an ongoing situation for many years as far as i know. not just something that popped up recently. so he does have a track record. he went straight to the newspapers skipping the forum here because most people didn't even know this forum existed way back then. probably still dont.

This guy lost 15.000 BTC when he sold his laptop in 2010 and has accepted it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=7REN3yYPY6E

This has nothing to do with Bitcoin as it is entirely the person's fault. If the man had kept his keys in a well-protected place or at home, this would never have happened and he had completely forgotten about it. If he had kept his key/seed phrase stored in a safe place in his home, he would never have lost so much money. It's really stupid to forget the keys to a wallet with so much money, and it would be completely wrong for this person to blame or pressure the city council for this. Although he has lost a large amount of money, he may have suffered a lot for which he is blaming others. But it is not right to blame someone else for his own mistakes surely he will understand when he is in full health. He may be mentally broken because of losing a lot of money but later he will surely understand and then he will not blame anyone but he will realize his own fault.

Well, people are different, just as it is commonly said that as our faces are different, so is out attitudes, and so also is our level of comprehension.

Some people are gifted, and have that ability to easily let things slide or go, most especially, things they know that they no longer have power over, but some other people, letting go is difficult, accepting that something is completely lost is a 'No for them, because accepting such could mean death for them.

That is well said in my opinion. It doesn't make much sense to me e.g. if people calculate how much those two pizzas have costed with current value of Bitcoin. At the time in 2010 those 10,000BTC weren't worth that much and for Laszlo it was OK and fair to offer that amount of bitcoins. And as far as I read somewhere Laszlo is fine with that milestone in Bitcoin history.

If you are the type who calculates past spends with today's rates and you loose your mind a little bit or more, then I suggest you stick to hodling.  ;D

Life is too precious to hold on to the past and worry. Learn to let go and live a happier life.

And what else is left to do? Let him always think now that he could be rich, and how much I know human nature - now, always learning the price of bitcoin, he will think "but my 15,000 bitcoins could be $ 400 million." But our human psychology is very flexible and I think that he will not worry much about such a loss. In the end, the main thing is your health and the health of your loved ones, and you can always figure out how to earn money.

I think he should be given a chance at his luck you know. He has been on it for a very long time, although I consider it unhealthy, hygienically, but it might be his own shot at destiny, at least, he isn't imposing the bill on anyone to take care of.

The idea of tossing his hard drive laden with 7500 bitcoin was not an informed one, obviously, but who would have imagined that it'll be worth a fortune today. The city council should allow him do his unearthen process and give his luck a try.

who throws away a working hard drive? not me! i don't know why he did it. but that was a dumb thing to do. use it as a backup device or something but don't contribute to the landfill waste for no good reason.

A threat that never meant anything to the city council, do we think he could make such a threat because he lost something he had. The case that happened to him was not caused by someone else's fault and how could he possibly sue a particular institution because he lost something because of his own fault? This threat could also get him into trouble with the law? for carrying out unpleasant actions against certain institutions.

It's a big regret to lose hundreds of dollars in bitcoin, but the man can't do anything about it. The next step is to forget that, buy and hold bitcoin because that's the only way so that the man doesn't lose his mind and become even crazier doing unexpected things that have no benefit

There are not too any options unless someone wants to live his life just regretting a wrong decision. It is what it is, unfortunately this Welsh guy looks like he can't accept his mistake and his throwing away the best years of his life (since he's still kind of young) pursuing something that will never get. He must live a pretty sad life. The majority of people on this forum took some wrong decisions at some point, it happens, we just need to accept it and keep going.

Even if this case was taken to court, on what grounds would this ever turn in his favour when the council were simply doing its job of taking care of the trash... besides by now contents of the trash could have corroded by now??? Btw for something he considers to have been valuable ,he shouldn't have been this careless and only add value to this after it was disposed off...

Regardless of what happened perhaps for the sake of closure let the man have his shot at digging up the trash maybe he will find his cold wallet.

I admire this man's unrelenting quest to find his hard drive and eventually get back the Bitcoin he own and be really rich and then enjoy the kind of life he is thinking he is deserving. However, by the looks of it, this is already a lost cause and he is already going beyond what a "normal" could do.

Certainly, while I love a person who is not giving up for any reason there comes a time when we have to accept reality. I am suggesting that to make some money, he can write a book with his whole Bitcoin experience and maybe there can even be movie studio to get interested to buy the rights to the book...and maybe he can still be a millionaire.

While it's unfortunate that the bitcoins were lost, engaging in constructive dialogue and working with local authorities to find a solution may be a more effective and amicable way to address the situation, rather than resorting to threats of bankruptcy.

He hopes to find the cold wallet in the rubbish pile and if he doesn't find it he will sue all the local councils who deal with waste disposal issues, he is very ambitious to be able to find the cold wallet again but the old rubbish has probably been destroyed. So he wanted to make a local council report to the police, but most likely his report was rejected because he made a mistake by throwing the hard wallet in the trash. Whatever the effort, it will be difficult to find the wallet device again, even if someone reports finding corroded hardware, the hardware cannot be repaired.

Of course it would have been best if the keys were written down on a piece of paper or in a notebook, this would never have happened if the pictures were in a safe place. A sane normal person cannot live with a simple mind because he has lost bitcoins. And it's true that any person will go crazy after losing 8k bitcoins because the current value of bitcoins is huge. That's why it's best to keep the keys of any wallet in a safe place.

The owner of the lost Bitcoins most likely did not anticipate Bitcoin's current high value like everyone else. If they had purchased it 10 years ago, they may have considered its value too low to expect the significant increase we see today. Unfortunately, the owner did not take any safety measures to recover the lost Bitcoins, as they disposed of the hard wallet without any backup.

Just think of the insane amount of labor that would be required to manually sift through every inch of ten plus years of accumulated garbage searching for a tiny little object.
Not just from one person's garbage but from tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people's garbage.

Who does he think is going to perform all that nasty work for him? Who on earth would be willing to do that nasty job?
How many months or years would it take? Is he going to do it by himself?  

i think the garbage dump kept computer records of what zones they put garbage in in different time periods so they could narrow the location down quite a bit and not have to search the entire garbage dump.

i think he had a business plan for that and had investors maybe. not sure.
it wouldn't take very long if they were just looking in a small area. probably months at most.

Come to think that even just leaving that hard drive on a dump site for 3 days or even a week would already that impossible for such recovery of those coins. This is why it would really be that somewhat useless.
It would really be best that you should really accept your fate on which there's no way that you could be able to see those coins again. There are really things in life on which if it isnt ours then it wont be.
Missed out opportunities could really happen into our lives and there's nothing we can do but to move on. Yes, its painful and a true nightmare. If you have decided to spend up some money to
get that harddrive back then its your choice but you are just basically wasting up your time and money.

How many years had passed already? Corrosion or water damage for sure it is.

Maybe the guy and the investors could buy the whole landfill site, then they could try to get the necesssary permits and dig as much as they like for the harddrive :)

What drives him is not logic nor reason but rather his insanity and regret. I don't understand how it would be the local council's fault if he trashed his hard drive knowingly. If he were to be granted rights to dive into the landfill and possibly get the hard drive, what are the chances that it's not severely damaged by corrosion and other elements? It's been years, and even the strongest metal, when exposed to the chemicals, moisture, and other such things in the landfill, will corrode or possibly even disintegrate. It's time to give up that 8k bitcoins. This dude is just moved by false hopes.

that does bring up a question. if someone has lost access to their bitcoins and can prove it, maybe there could be a protocol that would burn the lost bitcoins forever and then re-issue them under new private keys. what would be the harm in doing that to the bitcoin ecosystem? it's not really harming anyone. as long as they can prove they are the rightful owner. i guess people will say "how do you prove it?" but that's not the point. i'm saying "if you could prove it."

Doesn't matter how much money you throw at this wild goose chase at the end of the day, someone, or many someones, would have to manually sift through every square inch of the garbage in that zone. Who is going to do it? Even if they somehow narrowed it down to one zone of the landfill you're still talking about hundreds if not thousands of tons and years of accumulated garbage. No one in their right mind will want to perform such a ridiculous task. You would be exposing human beings to an extreme toxic environment. To call it inhumane would be an understatement as well as violating all kinds of labor laws and human rights violations.  



 

Just hire ex military special forces, they are trained for extreme challenging stuff :)

I was wondering if his wallet wan on a custodian of the local council. If by means wallets are been invaded and penetrated, is there a law or right holding a party responsible for it? Although it could only happen if your fund was Invested in an exchange of a centralized networks and could be traceable with evidence that the commission was responsible for your lost or on the note that there could be an insurance rapport agreement to keep your funds safe without excuses of lost or any negative trust.

I thought this guy had come to terms with this loss for a long time, but he got even more angry. Maybe the homeless have dug up this hard drive for a long time and the guy is suffering so much in vain.

Probably because we know that there would be those homeless people would be trying out to pick those things which they do saw that they could get benefit from and as for harddrive since it would really be that metal
then it could possibly that its been long time that had been picked up. For a long time then losing that 8k isnt something that you could really be able to move on so easily. Just like on what those things mentioned above
by some members that water+corrosion damage would already be that enough for that HDD not to be able to recover and since its been long time that it had been dumped then there's no way that he could get those coins back. Yes, it is surely a pain but there's nothing we can do but to move on in life. Living with this kind of nightmare wont really be that easy but just been said that lets move forward as there would be still
tons of opportunities that we can have on this market.

I thought something new actually happened since this thread reappeared but in the end it was just another shitposter necroing the old topic while adding absolutely nothing new and instead reporting that post, people jumped on it. Smh...

It seems he has gone crazy because he lost 8k Bitcoins due to his own mistake, becomes very regretful and is even willing to take any action to find the hard disk. It's been years and can the hard disk still be saved if it is in a pile of other rubbish? He lives with a lifetime of regret and becomes very crazy when he can't get it back.

It truly is a story of someone ruining their life by not being able to let go. Instead of moving on with his life he’s going to spend his entire life chasing what could have been. A shame that having all the Bitcoin became a curse to him. If he had just poured all his resources into getting more BTC instead of chasing what he lost he probably would have ended up pretty well off.

But we can't blame him. Imagine a large amount of bitcoin is gone. Added to how much bitcoin value is, you will certainly have that regret in your entire life, and it will keep on bagging you even though you don't want to. But still, it's his fault because if he just tortures anything he has, it could never happen. But what he is doing now is like a desperate move wherein he was ready to dedicate his entire life in order to find that hard drive containing his bitcoins, but do you think it will still be feasible? I think not. I'm sure that hard drive is already crushed a long time ago, so how can he find it? But yeah, maybe the thought has gone through his head, and he still has the hope that he will find it one day. You are right; instead of wasting his time, he should start all over again. If that bitcoin is not destined for him, then so be it. Will that person narrow his life because of that mistake?

The man had a dead end and couldn't think clearly anymore because he lost 8K bitcoins from his mining. Even though it was still 2013 and he could get more bitcoins easily because the price was still under $1000. Just try if he just focused on mining again and looking for more Bitcoins, then losing 8k Bitcoins wouldn't be a dark tragedy in his life. This is because he can't move on and can't think forward and only focuses on a search that hasn't found a common ground until now. But if we were in that man's position, of course stress would hit us and we don't know what we would do.

Actually, we can. People have lost more than that amount to hacks, scams, and extortions. But they never tried to bankrupt government departments over it. They started over from scratch. This is the kind of thing you have to leave behind and move on.

Threatening legal action against the local council might not be a productive approach, as the responsibility for safeguarding one's assets ultimately lies with the owner. It's a tough lesson, but hopefully, it encourages others to take extra precautions when managing their cryptocurrency holdings.

what did you EXPECT to happen? them to say "sure james, come on in and look for your hard drive." of course not. if you're looking for that kind of update then maybe you should be on a different forum, a make believe one.


here's another update:

Council respond to dad who binned £275m Bitcoin hard drive in landfill
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/no-chance-dad-who-binned-32114384

a very recent one!

My favorite part of the article:


I guess the "AI technology" helps determine what a hard drive might possibly look like in a field of debris? Aside from that, this is 3,000 cubic meters of waste they need to sort through in order to find it. A total waste of time, IMO. The worst outcome (which is also one of the most likely) would be doing all that work and then not finding it. Dude needs to be more like Laszlo the Pizza Guy & let it go.

I have a hard drive which is about 4 years old. It has stopped working and I even tried to follow internet tutorials and visited customer support offline channel also. But they all told me that it is impossible to recover the data now. And here, this guy is trying for 17 year old hard drive in a much more pathetic condition. I guess common sense is not so common anymore.

If your drive has an electronics or mechanical issue and stops working because of it, what do you expect from "internet tutorials"? Which offline customer support did you visit? Your local computer hardware dealer? Serious and sophisticated data recovery from storage media likely isn't their field of expertise. It's easier to dismiss than tackle a challenging problem.

Who is "they all"? (Never mind, it's more of a rhetorical question.)

Professional data recovery services with years of experience, e.g. like Ontrack, CBL Data Recovery, SalvageData, ..., are usually able to recover data even from dead drives. The really big ones have large stocks of spare parts for all kinds of old and current harddrives. If you really need the data and are willing to pay for it, those companies even disassemble the platter stacks and scrape data from your individual platters with specialized equipment. But this will cost you a few grands...

I'm no expert in this field and I have also doubts that data recovery from a drive that has been exposed to nature's elements for years has any chance of success due to corrosion and moisture doing their nasty work of destruction.

there is also the trust issue. they're going to know you have a bitcoin wallet on the hard drive so if they recover that data, they might get your private keys and cash out. and you can't prove anything. just circumstantial evidence. never heard of a hdd recovery service scamming the private keys but it could happen.  :o

with so much money and risk at stake to do a project like that, you would think they would do a test run where they bury a hard drive in some waste underground and check on it every year to see if the data is still readable. but i guess they forgot to do that and jumped to the conclusiion.

Thats what multi-million amount would be able to make you on which you would really be making yourself that too dumb and cant think off well or already making yourself that delusional that
you could really be able to find that hard drive on which is true that it is really that something delicate electronics. Come to think that even dropping it on your desk could already be enough on
potentially breaking that thing. How much more on trying to find for a decade+ kind of lost hdd? Better move on because if you do make yourself that thinking up always
on being that imaginary rich person then sooner or later you would really be finding yourself on a mental hospital.  ;D

2013 he says: "I had 7500 bitcoins on a hard drive that I'd thrown away"....."there's a specific file on that hard drive called a wallet file which the Bitcoin is stored in and without that file there is no way of getting the money back because there is no central server that records a log of it"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tMXLDVpPs8

It's not 7500 but 8000 bitcoins. They are not stored in a file on the hard drive and the log of it is on the Blockchain.

What he really needs is the private key to this address 198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5qkfy4g3Hi

Balance: 450,000,000.00 USD

old news, nothing new, someone necro-bumped this topic from ages ago

but for clarity..
the guy that lost his keys, has no legal bases to win. so nothing will come of it..

why? well lets explain:
when disposing of trash the guy lost rights to the property.
now it sits in landfill, meaning its now on the land owners property, in their possession..  meaning now the hard drive is property of the land owner(council)

the council has trespass policy set up which protects them from just allowing any unauthorised people onto the property.
he has no bases to be allowed on the landfill site

the guy knows this. he knows he wont get his trash(keys) back.. so last year wanted to get rich from suing, not from getting the keys..
but he would have lost the case too, which even before/without court proceeding is a 2nd financial loss of paying his own legal costs for a unwinnable venture in court and other costs over years of his pursuits
...and if it went to court it will cost him legal costs of having to pay the councils legal costs due to losing.. so that would have been a third loss.. should it have gone to court

regret is a big thing. but he should have spent the last 10 years doing all he could to find other ways to get rich

EG
when he lost his hard drive and he seen the price hit the 2nd ATH in 2013.. his regret then was he didnt have the 8k coin to sell at the 2013 peak
(8k*$1.2k=$9.6m(£7.6m)) he regretted not being a £7.6m millionaire

however instead of then funding £##k in land surveyors, IT/AI experts and legal advice and such to try getting the keys. he could have invested £58k* to buy 170btc in 2014's market correction (after his realisation of his mistake) which would get him to £7.6m today($9.6m) which would have brought him back to his regret win lose price

*yep buying 170k in 2014 would have been ~$400 each = $68k(£58k), which is probably cheaper than what he has spent on surveys and legal costs back then

..
but lets say he did take them to court in regards to the 'sue for hundreds of million to bankrupt council'
any good lawyer would subtly take notes when questioning him about his regret moments.
where he would admit his regret was due to noticing the second ATH (2013 of $1.2k(£946)) on the news and then selling obviously after the ATH
so lets call it back down to $400/btc by the time he put coins into a CEX after the ATH

which the council lawyers would then use as evidence that his plan and unrealised profit/claim of loss would have been only £2.6m($3.2m) not the hundreds of millions, not the $9m/$7m peak... because council lawyers would then recite his regret that he couldnt sell just after the 2013ATH price(his realisation moment) so that would have been the cut-off level of any settlement.. but he would have still lost the case and not get a settlement..
they would not need/have to offer, or propose paying £2.6m.. but any valid claim(which he hasnt got) would have been capped at under <£3m by the guys own admissions
so the council would not be worrying about going bankrupt

EDIT: responding to below
you waste your time on a puzzle you cant solve. trying to find a key you cant find...(your post history)
hmm sounds familiar to this story

i would have snidely said go play with the puzzle.. but honestly.. dont waste another breath on it, learn from your mistakes
 have a nice day.

in the united states, if you turn in damaged currency then they will replace it with usable currency as long as you didn't get it in a bank robbery (they'll know if you did since it would have red stains all over it). so if he could somehow bring a damaged hard drive to the court and sue the city council for ruining the data on that drive they might find in his favor. stranger things have happened.

that's easy to say but harder to accept when hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. no one is going to accept that answer if they're $100,000,000 lighter because of it.

you have to imagine that the landfill is secretly trying to get that hard drive.  maybe the reason they don't want him coming there and digging is because they already dug it up. and then when he realizes it, then he really does have a claim against them. for theft not of his hard drive but his bitcoin. unless he knows every single bitcoin address then maybe they already moved some of those coins to their own addresses.  :o

its got nothing to do with turning in currency to a bank to swap tainted bank notes for fresh crisp bank notes

its the FACT/law that by putting it in a trash bin and putting it at a roadside you are renouncing your ownership of the contents, by presenting it as available to be collected by a trash company/service
(as oppose to littering(just throwing it on the ground))

as soon as the trash truck arrives and puts that trash into the truck.. your ownership claim is gone
(as oppose to littering(just throwing it on the ground)where council will try to find owner and fine them for littering)

as soon as the trash truck arrives at someone someone elses land and puts it on the land.. its not your x2. it becomes the land owners property/problem
you have no claim on your trash no matter what it is. once in land fill

yep they even have laws about trash/litter, so the council cant lose, but the guy already has


the addresses are known and funds have not moved in a decade. so the workers at the landfill obviously didnt remember the area of the landfill the truck unloaded that day as yes the workers probably would have had a rummage in that area hoping to get jackpot to share between themselves

At 6:24 https://youtu.be/cZr97E5PgzQ?t=382

What franky1 said, that you cease ownership once you throw your stuff into trash, sounds plausible but may depend on local legislation or affected town's trash regulation. I'd say this isn't necessarily regulated in every country or town as franky1 painted.

But seriously the landfill operators very likely don't care at all because at the time of disposal and trash collection and dumping to the landfill the coins weren't worth the amount they are worth today or since Bitcoin jumped over five figures for $$$. This is pointless speculation.

You know, that reckless guy could've had a strong wallet locking passphrase, infeasible to break via brute-force or even sophisticated dictionary and human passwords cracking heuristics. Then what?

In some countries or towns trash is even partly separated for metals or other more or less valuable stuff before it's dumped or burned. What if the harddrive never made it into the landfill. The trash guys couldn't care less.

Brace for more speculation...  ;D

in uk, its once the trash truck picks it up from street
in US, its once you put trash out onto the street curb
in EU, same as UK

side note for those 'urban foragers'/'dumpster divers'
if the trash is within the property lines (back forecourt/delivery area of mall/supermarket) its not unowned. it still remains the property owners property. unless the trash is put out into the publicly accessible area outside of someones property line

..
in short the guy that lost his hard drive lost all ownership claims LEGALLY as soon as the trash truck drove down the road with the hard drive in it

My favorite part of this article is from the reader comments:


And:

Exactly! Whose idea was it to throw out the hard drives as trash in the first place? This guy seems to be a true loser. I just pity him!

He's in a vicious circle, the longer he has to wait – the more they are worth.

Balance today 503,313,115.05 USD

https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5qkfy4g3Hi

the least that guy could have done is sold his used laptop hard drive on ebay so another person could enjoy to use of it. someone that throws away perfectly good computer hardware, i'm glad something like this happened to them. what a wasteful person. now he's REALLY paying the price.  :o why would you throw away something that is fully functional. put it in a usb enclosure and use it as a backup drive but don't contribute to e-waste unnecessarily while depriving others of the ability to use that hardware. what a wasteful person. he got exactly what he deserved.

what are all those small transactions this address keeps getting. one of them was for 0.0008 btc which could be worth almost $50 if btc was $60,000. there's a bunch of them. i guess people are hoping they can help him recover his losses but that's not going to work because he doesn't know the PRIVATE KEY  ::)

That hard drive is long gone, even if they found it, the possibility of it being still on a working order is close to impossible, ain't no way that hard drives before 2013 are strong enough to survive from falling from high places and being move around and bumping solid stuff along the way, that's going to damage the disk inside as I recall, these hard drives are fragile. I guess the way for this man's obsession to end is if he accepts the fact that he's losing a battle that wasn't winnable in the first place and I'm definitely sure that even if he succeeds with the bankruptcy of the city council, it's never going to bring back the bitcoin that he had thrown away.

nope, its spammer bots that send dust to addresses that are popular (these bots scrape social media/forums for addresses that have some notoriety)

same goes for satoshis publicly known bitcoin address to hal.. initially it got donations of thanks for building bitcoin, but recent years is just spammer bot dust

i really don't understand why such bots exist. behind the bots is a person who owns that bitcoin and wants to divide it into tiny pieces and send it to total strangers as many as they can find? that's kind of like throwing your money away.

its unfortunate people sent satoshi significant amounts of bitcoin because he already has way more than he could ever use assuming he's still here on this earth and still has the private keys. both big assumptions. their contribution i'm afraid means very little except to maybe themself as a symbolic gesture but it doesn't really help anyone not even satoshi. it only helps them maybe feel better for a time. until they end up needing that cash for something maybe then they might wish they could get it back.  :o

now about this landfill guy,
 apparently he kept all his bitcoin on a SINGLE address. i've heard of crazy things before but that's really crazy! that just shows how much of an amateur he was but i guess at that time, everything was much simpler. you just had p2pkh addresses and that's what everyone used. legacy addresses. i think i might feel a bit "exposed" if i kept half a billion dollars on a single legacy bitcoin address. but apparently there's no chance it can be hacked.

Any chance a quantum computer might eventually be able to hack a single legacy address, say fifty years from now?

He gradually moved all his bitcoins to a single address, before he in april 2009 lost interest in generating more coins. And eventually in 2013 threw away the hard disk that contained the wallet.dat file where the corresponding private key is. The coins are safe in the blockchain at address 198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5qkfy4g3Hi

Even we know the first digit of the privatkey to the address. A quantum computer probably already knows more, and in fifty years all.

check out

1LdRcdxfbSnmCYYNdeYpUnztiYzVfBEQeC   53,880 BTC ($3,548,196,393)   
1AC4fMwgY8j9onSbXEWeH6Zan8QGMSdmtA   51,830 BTC ($3,413,218,644)   
1Ay8vMC7R1UbyCCZRVULMV7iQpHSAbguJP   51,165 BTC ($3,369,382,896)
1LruNZjwamWJXThX2Y8C2d47QqhAkkc5os   44,000 BTC ($2,897,564,272)

as for the 1fee's spambot
everyone knows those coins were scammed/stolen.
so by producing soo much dust im guessing the guy will snip off some coin to smaller hoards on different addresses and just claim one day when cashing out "not me sir, im not the hacker, some rando paid me, look he pays everyone something"

do you really think they could liquidate all of their bitcoins without getting significant slippage? i doubt it. how would someone even sell that much bitcoin? the government would be up their rear end in no time...but i guess that would be a good problem to have.  :o


a while back i heard about some scam where they sent dust to addresses and people accidentally sent them bitcoin because of that i forgot the name of the scam but apparently it is a thing.  ???

most of 1fee's activity stemmed from mtgox hack in 2011.. but other schemes since have come about since

anyways.........
.. topic:
landfill guy wont get coin nor rich from any lawsuit, he shoulda just reinvested in the 2014 correction

so the moral of this whole story is don't throw away good functional computer equipment, even if you upgraded. keep it around. it might come in handy. :-X

moral of story. if you lose your coin due to girlfriend cleaning up house and throwing hard drive away.. is time to replace your computer, investment and girlfriend. and not waste years chasing after what you lost

but yea keep the hard drive. even if you think you copied all wallet files to new system, keep old hard drive as a backup
not just for bitcoin but old family photos and documents you may not realise you might want to see sometime in the future

If I recall what quantum computers are, they're the kind of computers that can do really complex equations and math problems that would take a normal computer hundreds of thousands of years to answer right? Well, if that's the case then it would be a matter of whether quantum computing is really fast as it should be because to brute forcing a wallet is going take a really long time, I believe it's eons to predict one so I don't know if a quantum computer will be able to do any kind of damage when it comes to brute forcing a wallet to get an access on it. This is one of those times that it would be better know if we arrive at that point and see it for ourselves if quantum computers can really do it.

With this kind of user experience, it is important that we make decision on the means of storing our bitcoin by considering the safety first, in case of any physical challenge through water, fire or any other damage encountered with the storage devise of our asset, can we still have an alternative means to getting access back this these coins on the blockchain with the alternative storage made on the keys or not, we have to be more concerned about these and put them into consideration that our asset must have a storage back up for our private keys.

Nope, label important pieces of your equipment properly so it won't get thrown out accidently. Have your important stuff in some box, case, drawer, ... which your GF/BF is not allowed to touch or whoever messes around in your belongings.

You should always have redundant backups. No backups, no mercy!

You fucked up? Move on, reinvest, don't hopelessly clinge to the past.

Such an action is terrible to have concluded that what you once believed to have good future is now considered be useless which led to discarding them. I think this will serve as a lesson to people who easily discard things without a rethink.

I will advice  him to forget and move on Else he will end up in a state he does not want. If he love his life, he should forget the asset and build new one. But he thinks getting the drive is possible with the information intact, let him give a try with a soft mind in order to keep his peace untampered.

i think he had some drawer he kept things in but that still didn't stop him from looking at the hard drive and saying to himself "i should throw that away i don't need it anymore". what a bonehead thing to do, throwing away a good hard drive. do people really do that? throw away a good piece of computer equipment that is functional because if so then i need their phone number.

he didn't think anything on the drive was important thus no need to backup i guess!


i kind of regret more that a perfectly good hard drive was thrown away never to be used again rather than what was on the said hard drive. i hope the gentleman who lost all his bitcoin comes to see things from that perspective too one day.  :-[