347
Man who threw away $500M Bitcoin hard drive sues city for right to search landfill
(www.techspot.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
347 points (95.5% liked)
Technology
59588 readers
4723 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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?
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
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
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.
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.