Owner of 8K bitcoin lost in landfill threatens to bankrupt local council

[zabzob]

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:

An excavation, the father says, would take nine to twelve months and would be aided by specially employed AI technology. The engineer says he has studied aerial photographs of the site and believes the hard drive is in a 200-metre squared area and could be 15-metres deep.

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.

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

How do you know if the ex actually kept it and it wasn't binned? Did he see her bin it?

And:

Is this the digital equivalent of keeping your money in the mattress?

[9TONNN]

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. 

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!

[AndrewWeb]

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

[larry_vw_1955]

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

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.   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.

[larry_vw_1955]

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

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 

[pinggoki]

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.

[franky1]

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

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  

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

[larry_vw_1955]

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

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.

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

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. 

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.

[zabzob]

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?

[AndrewWeb]

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.

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

[AndrewWeb]

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

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

[franky1]

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.

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"

[larry_vw_1955]

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)

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.  

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"

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.  

[franky1]

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)

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.  

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"

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

[larry_vw_1955]

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.

[franky1]

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.

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

[blckhawk]

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

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.

[Dunamisx]

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. 

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.

[Cricktor]

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.

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.

[Forever101]

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.