Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site

by T-zex • 13 years ago

163 123 13 years ago

topynate• 13 years ago

The attitude of Newport council - everyone, really - seems pretty nuts to me. $7 million is about 185 kilos of gold. Imagine what would happen if someone lost that in a rubbish tip!

judk• 13 years ago

200kg of gold is of course easier to trawl out of a pile than one (possibly destroyed) hard drive is.

Look forward to treasure hunters attacking the site though.

Bitcoin disks may be the future of buried treasure.

kamjam• 13 years ago

I wonder how many hard drives are retrieved and then somehow rescued - which may no longer power up so expert help to recover data off the platters is required. Rinse. Repeat.

DanBC3• 13 years ago

A soccer / football pitch has an area of about 7140 square metres.

They say the drive could be "3 or 4 feet deep" - let's just call that one metre. So it's only 7140 cubic metres to search.

Admittedly, that's 7140 cubic metres of foul trash. It will include soiled babies diapers, rotting food, female sanitary products, tins, bottles, etc etc.

Assuming you could find the drive at a cost of one million. (roughly £140 per cubic metre) That'd give you 6 million to share between you and the council.

I guess you could add some environmental fixing thing in there (removing any electronics that are found, recycling any glass or metals vent methane, etc, and give them £2m, and keep the rest?

hnha2• 13 years ago

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

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

brazzy2• 13 years ago

The problem: even if you find the derive after spending all that money, there is a very good chance it is completely unreadable after spending months in a landfill.

warbastard• 13 years ago

Seeing as he has a good idea of when it was thrown away surely that narrows down where it could be quite considerably. He just needs someone to invest some money in finding it with him for a share of the wealth. I wouldn't have given up if I were him.

MichaelApproved2• 13 years ago

That's assuming the data will still be intact when the drive is recovered.

Edit: I'd guess the odds of the data still being intact are close to zero. A drive is so fragile I doubt it survived. Consider it being thrown around in a garbage truck and then slowly buried under several feet of other trash. Several inches of trash at a time, over time, with trucks rolling over the area each time. Then, consider the weather and other garbage juices drenching the device.

It's a goner...

nitrogen• 13 years ago

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

kintamanimatt• 13 years ago

Hard drives are fairly robust when unpowered and can take quite heavy shocks and still be fine. The drive itself might be fucked but so long as the platters are in one piece there's a decent hope a good data recovery co could retrieve the data. The danger is it got bent or crushed, and that'd be what I'd guess has happened.

abrichr• 13 years ago

He could just buy 100 hard drives, install GPS locators in them, and then throw them out once a week. Then he could calculate the probability that the original drive still exists based on how many of the new ones survive. He might even be able to infer something about its location.

yafujifide• 13 years ago

Another way to mine for bitcoin.

erikig• 13 years ago

My favorite quote from the article:

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

He should definitely have found another way...

orblivion• 13 years ago

Hmm... Or a great practical joke.

simplemath2• 13 years ago

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

dmix3• 13 years ago

Why does every bitcoin comment thread have this conversation? It doesn't matter if a tiny percentage of the currency does not exist in the marketplace or gets lost.

21 million / 0.00000001 = how many bitcoins can "exist".

So considering that there's no real blocking factors in how many bitcoins can be distributed, why does it matter if some get lost?

The value of the coins are hardly affected now that such a high level of adoption has occurred. Those coins weren't even in previous circulation in any marketplaces affecting prices.

Jtsummers8• 13 years ago

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

jballanc• 13 years ago

Ask the Zimbabweans about the insignificance of 14 zeros in your currency. History is littered with far more examples of currency revaluation than long-term stable measures of wealth (in fact precious metals are, possibly, the only example).

simplemath2• 13 years ago

The current market cap is based on the notional value of all coins mined to date x current market value of 1 BTC. If there are actually 1 million BTC (0r 100k or whatever)missing, lost or otherwise irretrievable, then the price per bitcoin is notionally higher.

Of course, there's no way to ever prove some coins were lost or not so the point is moot.

In a roundabout way I agree with you, just not for the same reasons.

In effect the lost coins are already priced in, I just find the idea of lost BTC fascinating.

celticninja• 13 years ago

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

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

vinhboy• 13 years ago

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

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

Laptop drives just aren't as useful as desktop drives (most towers can take 3-5 3.5" drives, most laptops can take exactly 1x 2.5"), and this particular platter was probably only 64-256GB?

sdoering• 13 years ago

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

marincounty• 13 years ago

Data recover guys need old drives. I always wondered why anyone would want my toshiba 5gb drive--some guy on craigslist drove to my house in the middle of the night. A client of his business fried his harddrive, with all the company account on it. He needed my drive for parts.

yelnatz• 13 years ago

Most people just throw away their laptops when it breaks for whatever reason.

Even if the HD was ok, they won't even bother opening it up.

mangotree2• 13 years ago

True, but most people don't have bitcoins.

akkartik4• 13 years ago

A not-unreasonable penalty for risking pollution of his ground water, especially since he probably did the same thing to electronics many times before. I can't believe nobody is talking about this. Illegal in many US states.

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...

eterm• 13 years ago

Since this is in Europe, it's probably better to refer to the European legislation.

However, it looks like the UK implementation of the WEEE[1] is fairly narrow in scope.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electronic...

kbutler• 13 years ago

£4m penalty for discarding one hard drive is "not-unreasonable"?

boggle

You weren't on the Apple-Samsung or Newegg juries, were you?

hnha2• 13 years ago

£4m in bitcoin today might just be £40 tomorrow

akkartik4• 13 years ago

1. I believe penalties for polluting our externalities should be greater, yes. As evidence I cite the fact that people keep polluting with existing penalties/enforcement. The tragedy of the commons is a very real thing.

2. I wasn't recommending that be the legal penalty. But if karma decides to be a bitch to this guy, hey I ain't complainin'.

3. I was exaggerating for effect. Seemed for a good cause: We human beings are total bastards towards the environment.

buro9• 13 years ago

The actual story was sourced entirely from this reddit post: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rilcj/as_a_person_...

Which was sourced entirely from "someone in the IRC channel".

Whether it's true or not is one thing, but if it is then the reddit source also says:

He went to the "recycling centre" and they showed him around.

This makes some sense, I've 'recycled' before at places like this: http://www.hounslow.gov.uk/spacewaye

You go along, separate your stuff into several different piles. Pay fees for things like fridges, CRTs, etc. Then you leave.

The thing is... I don't actually believe that electrical equipment is really recycled. Stuff like monitors may have the most toxic bits removed, but I strongly suspect that all other electrical equipment is just put into landfill as-is.

If the story is all true then the facility in question is this one: http://www.newport.gov.uk/_dc/index.cfm?fuseaction=wasterecy...

Which is advertised as a recycling centre.

Which means the guy has done all that he could to get it recycled, and that it's the authorities and government services themselves who are just dumping stuff in landfill even when it was delivered as recycling.

All that said... if it was recycled as advertised, then the chances of it still existing would be closer to zero than the current scenario.

akkartik4• 13 years ago

Good points, thanks. That'll teach me to get worked up without looking at the sources.

kaffeinecoma• 13 years ago

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

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

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

nilved• 13 years ago

I don't have anything to add to the conversation except for the fact that your comment made me literally laugh out loud at its absurdity and naivete. Thanks, I needed that.

pbreit• 13 years ago

Give me a break. Who doesn't throw hard drives into the trash? And are you really so sure hard drives are included in any of the state e-waste laws? I doubt very many if any.

edubart• 13 years ago

He is not the only one, back in 2010 I did mine 160 BTC, however at some point I stopped caring. Months later I had to format hard disk because ArchLinux did a great job breaking the whole system with an update, in the moment I just didn't remember that there were a BitCoin wallet in my system. Damn ArchLinux.

Although I didn't lose much as him. Now I kinda feel relieved knowing his mistake, he lost much more than me, I am sure that there are much others at the same spot. We all just contributed to elevate the bitcoin price by making misery out of our selves.

ed209• 13 years ago

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

pilgrim689• 13 years ago

Yes. The "total pool of bitcoins" is actually less than 21m, considering the lost ones. Does it matter, though? Whether the max is 21m or 20.1321029 ...

Jtsummers8• 13 years ago

Potentially. There's a chance that someone could recreate the same keys for the lost wallets, but the odds are not in their favor (gross understatement). If this happened they'd be able to create transactions moving the bitcoins in the formerly lost wallets to their own wallet(s). However, until someone gets so lucky these bitcoins are locked out of the economy.

maxerickson• 13 years ago

They are pretty much lost, unless a plurality of miners decide to change the rules.

aric• 13 years ago

No. They are still there, accounted to that address in the blockchain. In the rare event that someone discovers the private key used to derive that address: happy days. In the near term, practically speaking, you can negate them from circulation. It's a very low probability that it'll be spent.

Aldo_MX2• 13 years ago

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

Jtsummers8• 13 years ago

A lazy install and a bad Arch Linux update (actually, a misinterpretation of some error messages on my part) reminded me why it was stupid to have /home on the same partition as everything else. Multipartition setups are trivial and will save your data (in my case I lost nothing but some toy OpenCL programs as it was my gaming rig, and most important stuff was kept on a shared partition).

MichaelApproved2• 13 years ago

A quick format doesn't destroy all the data on the drive. Depending on how much you used that drive, you might still be able to recover the data.

mbq• 13 years ago

Come one, Arch is maybe one of the easiest distros to break but certainly one of the easiest to fix using chroot from USB live image. Forums are very helpful, and also if some current update is possibly breaking there is a deep post on the homepage discussing how not to break the system and how to recover from a broken state.

ck22• 13 years ago

Howells ran a program on his laptop for a week to generate his stash

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

giarc• 13 years ago

Something about hindsight being 20/20.....

ck22• 13 years ago

Actually a good lesson about being an optimist vs pessimist.

Many of us wrote it off.

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

Buge• 13 years ago

With 50 bitcoins per block, 6 blocks per hour, that would be 7200 bitcoins generated per day total.

So this guy made up more than 1/7 of the entire bitcoin network?

There were less than 6 people besides him that had as powerful of computers?

yitchelle• 13 years ago

Gives a different meaning to buried treasure...

chuckd13562• 13 years ago

Pardon my ignorance, but how do you prove a) He doesn't have a copy of the private key? b) He's telling the truth about mining them? c) Actually threw away the drive?

john_b• 13 years ago

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

chuckd13562• 13 years ago

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

sogen• 13 years ago

Agreed, sounds fishy and a great way to get exposure, The Guardian covering this pyramid scheme, and to get it into the mainstream...

FrankenPC• 13 years ago

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

tux• 13 years ago

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

Jtsummers8• 13 years ago

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

hkbarton• 13 years ago

mine bitcoin in trash

JanezStupar• 13 years ago

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

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

Talk about bad financial decisions.

draaglom• 13 years ago

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

fjhqjv• 13 years ago

How long can a computer hard drive remain in working condition while buried in a landfill?

batbomb• 13 years ago

Assuming there's not too much iron and steel in the land fill, it's might be possible he could find it with a sensitive enough magnetometer at 1 meter, maybe more so if you built a motor to move it around rapidly. I think the field strength at 1 meter might be something like 1 milliGauss, which should definitely be detectable. Walking the field and recording the magnetic fields might be possible, you'd at least know the range you needed. Secondly, any recent dated arial photos could maybe be used to determine a better approximation of depth, i.e. looking for a marker in the actual photo, then going to dig to find that marker, record the depth.

joggg• 13 years ago

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

ams6110• 13 years ago

There's a fair chance the drive is unreadable. Exposed to the elements, and when trash is put in a landfill it's not just dumped, it's mixed with earth and pushed around with bulldozers. I would not be surprised if it has been crushed.

But who knows?

acomjean2• 13 years ago

Its probably all right. I worked in landfills and dug up old trash in expanding a site. Unopened glass soda bottles from 30 years ago, books in great condition, metal lunch boxes in great shape. The lack of moisture means it just sits there. It depends on how deep it was buried when it came off the truck and it survived the first pass at burying.

"Does anyone have a power adapter for this notebook? the battery is dead...."

Jagat• 13 years ago

More than that, there would be tons of metals. The magnetic field generated would be enough to destroy any remaining data in the hdd.

incision2• 13 years ago

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

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

citricsquid• 13 years ago

Talk to these guys, they're highly regarded in r/bitcoin and you can do it without compromising access to the coins: http://www.walletrecoveryservices.com/

incision2• 13 years ago

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

ericb2• 13 years ago

There are some people who believe a realistic value for bitcoin in the success scenario could be circa 1 million dollars (if it were to partially supplant gold or USD).

As a thought experiment, if I google for landfill prices, I see prices like 40 million dollars for a landfill. So if you can mine one hard drive in that scenario, landfills should be massively more valuable.

Perseids• 13 years ago

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

ericb2• 13 years ago

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

acomjean2• 13 years ago

People throw away money all the time. I used to do landfill design. Summers were spent on sites doing inspections. My former boss tells the story someone came looking for trash from a specific location. They ask, did anyone see metal box? They went to look for it and couldn't find it. Asked what was in the box, the response was "Money, a lot of money..."

If you throw something away by mistake your only chance is to get to the landfill before the truck does and hope they'll dump in a separate area you can pick through.

Datsundere• 13 years ago

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

vijayboyapati• 13 years ago

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

dnyce• 13 years ago

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

mangotree2• 13 years ago

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

TomGullen• 13 years ago

Offer a £1m cash reward to landfill owner

georgemcbay• 13 years ago

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

boyter• 13 years ago

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

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

bane• 13 years ago

Eventually over time, once all the bitcoins are mined and out and about in the world. They'll get lost for various reasons. Is there a way to recover these lost bitcoins and return them to circulation or is the artificial scarcity of bitcoins going to turn into real scarcity and drive up prices even more?

adventured• 13 years ago

The short answer is, no.

A digital currency could be designed with this in mind, but it would seemingly require an official ownership registry or something equally effective on identification (if you can't prove loss, you can't return them to circulation).

Much like with physical currencies, or gold, the reduction of outstanding supply increases the value for everyone else holding. There's no across-the-board right argument to whether that's a good thing or not.

Jtsummers8• 13 years ago

The bitcoin network demonstrated that with enough cooperation they can fix some issues (see the blockchain fork from a while back). However, as adventured said, there's no way to verify that any individual bitcoins in an old address are actually lost. Unless that address is strongly associated with you (very, very strongly) you can't simply assert that it's a lost address (especially since you can't use it anymore to send anything as verification). It's quite possible, especially with the way some people are using cold wallets/paper wallets, that a lot of inactive addresses are just people waiting for the value to go up (invest and forget). Or people who got a bitnickel from a faucet a couple years ago and have the wallet, but haven't found a use for it yet.

nnq• 13 years ago

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

rcthompson3• 13 years ago

So, this raises an interesting question for me. Since the total supply of Bitcoins is limited by design, doesn't every forgotten or lost Bitcoin reduce the total supply?

In other words, suppose, hypothetically, that after all Bitcoins have been mined, I bought them all, stored them on a hard drive (with no backup, obviously), and then destroyed that hard drive (let's say I threw it into a black hole). Does Bitcoin still exist?

MAGZine• 13 years ago

Yes. The lost currency is essentially removed from the pool. The result is deflation--because there is less supply, the currency is worth more. Goods cost the same, so the bitcoin value for a certain product/service drops.

At least this is what economics would seem to dictate. You can send tiny partitions of bitcoin, so it's really easy to send a millionth of a bitcoin, where if $40t disappeared from the USD, you can't give 1/1,000,000 of a dollar (not that you would anyhow, since you can't irreversibly dispose money--you just print more)

rcthompson3• 13 years ago

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

muxxa• 13 years ago

What if the situation continues and large percentages of the bitcoin pool are of unknown status (could be lost, could be in the possession of a government institution, could be being hoarded). Would this make bitcoin more risky compared to a hypothetical competing crypto currency that can account for the status of all of it's coins? Could this make bitcoin untenable?

tedunangst2• 13 years ago

More plausible scenario: Bill Gates converts all his wealth to bitcoin, as will inevitably happen when bitcoin overtakes the dollar. He dies, but forgets to put his password in the will. oops.

Normally, if a rich person dies without a will (or without specifying their bank password), there are legal procedures for the heirs to fight it out in court and collect. With bitcoin, poof, it's gone.

PeterisP• 13 years ago

Well, just as if you buy a pile of gold, bury it someplace deep and obscure, and forget to tell your heirs where exactly it is.

You may happen to 'find' the bitcoin keys with some forensics, or it may never be found.

bafjohnson• 13 years ago

I have misplaced Bitcoins currently worth in excess of $700,000 / £430,000. They were purchased a couple of years back.

I've not even started the search for them properly as I know how gutted I will feel if I definitely can't find them. At the end of the day, it's only money and there's always time to make more. Time is the one thing of which we have a finite amount!

wlievens• 13 years ago

Err, with more money you'll have to spend less time on making money you know :-)

ep103• 13 years ago

If I lost 700,000$ of anything, I'm fairly certain I would quit work and devote myself to finding them. I mean, even if I spent a year doing it, that's a larger rate of potential return than anything I'll see in my lifetime.

lcuff• 13 years ago

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

Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site

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