It would be so fucking funny if these bitcoins never existed and this is all one big ruse to trick crypto investors into excavating a landfill.
My favourite part from this story covered on another site was
Howells says that if only the council had entertained his excavation requests, “Newport would look like Dubai.” Currently, it still looks like Newport.
Does he really think $500M would significantly change a city? As if the city would get any part of it, or that Dubai is something to desire…
For all the talks about freedom and “decentralised” utopia the crypto bro cults spew all the time, they are really just obsessed with making absurd amounts of money fast. Their only motivation is greed.
Can’t say I’m surprised some regard Dubai as a goal. They only see the rich man’s club, they don’t care about how the sausage is made.
Yeah wtf. Seeing Dubai as the ultimate utopia is so weird.
Their only motivation is greed.
Gee, i’m so glad brick ‘n’ mortar banks are different… oh, wait…
Last time I checked, most individuals are not, in fact, banks.
Last time i checked banks and “regulating” bodies are run by, you guessed it, groups of individuals.
Which are not, by far, most people. I am not sure why you’re bringing the subject of banks. Of course they’re shitty and mostly run by bastards. Okay.
But cryptomoney people are not banks, or groups of individuals. They’re individuals. And they’re in it because of the “get rich quick” scheme and push others to get into the pyramid’s lower levels, because that’s how they might get richer. So they’re either bastards or being conned, or probably both.
Proof of work is a power/hardware catastrophe, and proof of stake is entrusting power to the already rich again. Crypto is not a new economy model, it’s a bad subset of the old one with fancy fake ideals.
Most cryptocrrencies do seem scammy, i’ll give you that,
Yes, he’s stupid.
Most likely he won’t find that treasure. Instead of wasting years of his life, and not the worst of them, he could be spending time with girls or working his ass off for some more certain value to spend as he sees fit.
He’s a crypto bro there’s no way he’s hanging out with any girls. Probably “nice guys” them into running away very fast, th n complains on the internet.
Or that dubai was built with such a paltry sum
I’ve heard about this dude since like…2018. At some point you have to move on. Shit like that will consume you, and it’s just not worth losing years of your life over it. Talk about a needle in a haystack.
It’s 500M though…
Well, it was. 11 years of landfill leachate have probably taken their toll, not to mention that it was probably crushed immediately under literal tons of soggy rainwater trash.
Life with friends and family is much more valuable than some extra 000s. Money can’t bring them back once they are gone. Nor can it be taken to the next life.
Okay, I see that. But it’s 500m tough…
Okay, there’s no chance he’s getting it back though…
Okay, but it’s 500m though…
Sometimes you can find scimitars in there. You can chop a camel right in its hump and drink all of its milk right off the tip of those things.
You throwing babies away?
🎵Money for nothing and checks for free🎶
bitcoin is just gambling and yall dropped your lotto ticket.
Chicks, not checks, btw.
Two checks at the same time, man.
Yortuk and Georg? You cruise correctly.
For $5M you can have all the chicks that you want… I joke that my wife keeps me in check and I keep her in cash.
Drives probably rusted away to nothing by now, even if he miraculously could find it the odds of getting anything from it are probably less than him winning the lottery.
Technicians can work wonders as long as the seals to the spinny bits are intact. It would be cool to see even if it’s just bitcoin
And if he does find it, 500m will pay for a lot of technicians
Technicians that will probably demand a commission not a flat rate. Might be wrong on that because I doubt he’ll find it.
Landfills are huge and a metal detector would be completely useless in this scenario. He has absolutely no idea where on the landfill it would be how deep down it would be or even if it’s definitely in there. Don’t a lot of places like this pull out anything that might be useful and sell them?
It depends on the sorting process. I don’t know much about his situation. If the hard drive got thrown into the trash, then it is most likely in a plastic bag somewhere buried. However, if it went through some kind of electronic recycling program then it was probably stripped for metals and parts.
IMO, if the dude wants to walk around the dump for the rest of his life trying to find his $500 million treasure chest then let him. The only problem with that is, how many other people are going to want to find things in the dump? Are we just going to allow people to wander through the dump now?? Perhaps instead of suing, he should just find someone willing to front the money to buy the entire dump. Haha.
There is some method to the madness of dumping, trucks are not allowed to drive around and find a spot. Trash deposits get cycled to keep the dump somewhat level. It’s a “fill up Sect 12A, then fill up 78C” type of deal.
It’s not parceled like land, no where close to being exact. If the paper records go back that far and are intact, it would be a “Check out Sect 91B…maybe 10 to 100 feet down. Good luck”
It’s not a dump but a landfill. There’s a liner to keep toxic trash from leaking into ground water. There are venting tubes for methane. There are alternating layers of trash and compacted soil to keep it stable.
https://indd.adobe.com/view/3a6b3f8c-bcd0-4917-9a48-5bf861a5afc6
Technicians that will probably demand a commission not a flat rate.
Never heard of anyone in that field doing this. If you walk into a computer repair place and say you need to recover data off a hard drive and they say they need to know how much the data’s worth before they can tell you the cost, you should probably just immediately walk out and go to a different store regardless because that’s probably a skeezy place.
not to mention but he might not even have ever had the bitcoin to begin with and is just doing a fishing expedition for dump hard drives in hopes one does have bitcoin on it
Bitcoin is saved with a password that’s held in RAM, so typing a different password will open a different wallet. This is in addition to the secret key saved on the hard drive. There’s no telling how much money a hard drive has, even to the person recovering it.
How much egg is gonna be on his face when he finds it one day behind a cabinet drawer?
This is the type of “buried treasure” story that kids have these days.
I just imagine a movie like The Goonies but instead of talking about a cave full their treasure, they tell stories about the “flash drive full of gold” that’s buried somewhere in the deepest reaches of the garbage dump.
“This is our time! Down here, this is our time!”
This article looks like someone “wrote” it using speech-to-text and didn’t double-check their work.
tossing a hard driving
the whole thing could be for not (instead of “the whole thing could be for naught.”)
and of course,
In a statement to Whales Online
Of course, if it turns out that whales have banded together to make their own website, I’ll stand corrected.
Well this guy would have been a whale if he’d backed up his keys.
Pretty sure he would still be a man, no matter how many keys he made.
This article is about a marine mammal. For other uses, see Whale (disambiguation).
Omg good one
What does “let him try and find the hard drive” really mean? Does he just want access to the landfill or is he expecting some kind of cooperation with the workers? How disruptive is he going to be?
Very disruptive. Landfills typically bury the day’s trash at the end of the day and it’s just layers and layers of garbage, like lasagna. You might be able to work on Monday’s trash slice, but by the time Thursday rolls around, it’s time to add a layer on top of Monday.
Digging could interrupt the entire landfill process if it’s still an active landfill, meaning the daily garbage has to be redirected elsewhere, because landfills aren’t just a hole in the ground, they are a feat of engineering.
I’m a simple man. I see Practical Engineering, I up vote.
He can’t get the money to find it so he is suing the city to take the risk.
If he prepaid the $50 million to excavate, sort, and rebuild the landfill, there would be no problem.
Even if Howells was able to somehow find the drive, it’s been sitting in a landfill for more than a decade. Still, his team of experts believe there is about an 80 percent chance that data from the drive would be recoverable.
Is this copium?
500 million justifies using some very fancy data recovery means, as long as he’s sure it’s the right drive.
Its not like i am naive to economy but i cant help but see this:
Ape spends time and energy to convinces other apes to spend time, energy and resources, potentially sacrifice some of the environment and cause hinder to the local population. To dig for a metallic object discarded a decade ago so they can with some hope extract a codestring of information which will unlock some other strings of 0 and 1 that we then collectively agree on means this person has x many digital object which we all agree on has x economic value.
And if they succeed they will al smile because this is winning.
Here is sm either more radical/normal, depending on your perspective. Take the drive that has the wallet/or make it a physical one. Place it in a museum and name it “x Bitcoins”. Value recovered and nothing was lost.
Humans are weird.
You really don’t want to set precedent here. What if any random person starts having hallucinations about hard drives being lost in the trash. You don’t want anybody to have the right to dig up your landfill
I mean, as long as they are willing to pay all the costs of digging up a landfill up front… Why not?
Sure, if he buys the landfill from the city. I Don’t see a problem with that.
Anything short of that, disrupts current ongoing landfill operations.
I’m not seeing a negative here? As long as they accept liability why shouldn’t someone be able to dig through landfill?
the potential liability exceeds the value of what they’re searching for.
Air contamination, interruption of ongoing landfill operations, what if the landfills already capped? Do they get to reopen it? What contractors do you allow to do the work? Who takes the liability if they don’t fulfill the work to the specification? What if multiple people want to dig in the landfill at the same time? Who arbitrates? What’s the limit?
You’ll get payed when we find it!
All this time he could’ve thought up another magnificent way to make money but he chose to stay in the past, longing for something probably already completely degraded, destroyed or recycled, even if it’s 500M…
How would you make 500m if you’d already beaten the house once?
The new El Dorado.
Still, I’m not sure why the council are addressing their statements to “Whales Online”
Maybe more like the new Oak Island Money Pit.
In a statement to Whales Online
Ooooowwwaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh
