Hard Drive Tossed in Landfill With Bitcoin Now Worth $800 Million. Lawsuits Continue (theguardian.com) 205
11 years ago his hard drive ended up in a U.K. landfill — with 8,000 bitcoin. It's now worth $800 million... and James Howell wants it back.
The Guardian reports that his "bid to become extremely rich reached a judge on Tuesday with a team of lawyers arguing that it was still possible to launch a hunt for his missing hard drive containing the bitcoin." They claimed that rather than searching for a "needle in a haystack", the position of the bitcoin hoard had been narrowed down to a small area and there was a "finely tuned" plan to retrieve it... [Howells] has been asking Newport city council for help in getting the hard drive back, and even said he would share the money with the authority, to no avail... James Goudie KC, representing the council, said Howells had no legal claim to the hard drive. He said: "Anything that goes into the landfill goes into the council's ownership."
Goudie said Howells' offer to share some of the bitcoin with Newport council amounted to a bribe. He said: "He is trying to buy something the council is not in a position to sell...." Before the hearing, a spokesperson for Newport council said: "The council has told Mr Howells multiple times that excavation is not possible under our environmental permit and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area. "Responding to Mr Howells' baseless claims are costing the council and Newport taxpayers time and money which could be better spent on delivering services."
Howells was 28 when he lost the hard drive, and has said he may as well keep trying to recover it — because he'll always know that it's out there. Howells' legal teams are "working pro bono," the article notes, "on the basis that they get a share of the bitcoin profits if successful..." And TechSpot points out that "There's also the question of whether the data on the drive would still be accessible after more than a decade of sitting under a pile of rotting garbage.
"Howells has a team of data recovery engineers who are also working pro bono..."
Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the news.
The Guardian reports that his "bid to become extremely rich reached a judge on Tuesday with a team of lawyers arguing that it was still possible to launch a hunt for his missing hard drive containing the bitcoin." They claimed that rather than searching for a "needle in a haystack", the position of the bitcoin hoard had been narrowed down to a small area and there was a "finely tuned" plan to retrieve it... [Howells] has been asking Newport city council for help in getting the hard drive back, and even said he would share the money with the authority, to no avail... James Goudie KC, representing the council, said Howells had no legal claim to the hard drive. He said: "Anything that goes into the landfill goes into the council's ownership."
Goudie said Howells' offer to share some of the bitcoin with Newport council amounted to a bribe. He said: "He is trying to buy something the council is not in a position to sell...." Before the hearing, a spokesperson for Newport council said: "The council has told Mr Howells multiple times that excavation is not possible under our environmental permit and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area. "Responding to Mr Howells' baseless claims are costing the council and Newport taxpayers time and money which could be better spent on delivering services."
Howells was 28 when he lost the hard drive, and has said he may as well keep trying to recover it — because he'll always know that it's out there. Howells' legal teams are "working pro bono," the article notes, "on the basis that they get a share of the bitcoin profits if successful..." And TechSpot points out that "There's also the question of whether the data on the drive would still be accessible after more than a decade of sitting under a pile of rotting garbage.
"Howells has a team of data recovery engineers who are also working pro bono..."
Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the news.
Oak Island Redux (Score:4)
And another pointless, unbelievably expensive and litigiously hazardous treasure hunt ensues.
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Pay the city open a new landfill and buy the old one. Then they can do whatever they want.
Re:Oak Island Redux (Score:5, Insightful)
Pay the city open a new landfill and buy the old one.
Pay with WHAT??
I doubt any bank's going to give him any amount of credit backed by 'lost Bitcoins'
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As part of the excavation and sorting, maybe the new owners will find other things of value (like scrap metal not old video game consoles)
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Somebody is financing the excavation which will be extraordinarily expensive.
with vanishingly small odds of being successful in the end. In order to cover the work is done properly, it'd probably require a substantial deposit - someone else said $1billion, so they don't bail on some sort of bankruptcy when (not if) they fail.
As part of the excavation and sorting, maybe the new owners will find other things of value (like scrap metal not old video game consoles)
If there were real chances of this being lucrative, all landfills would be getting mined already.
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If he gets it back, I predict that the costs of recovery will be the value of the bitcoin plus $100.
Re:Oak Island Redux (Score:5, Insightful)
Pay the city open a new landfill and buy the old one. Then they can do whatever they want.
You have to promise to put it back after searching, otherwise you leave a massive mess where the old landfill was. Unfortunately, if they fail to find the hard disk, or, as is almost certain, it's broken beyond repair, then the people searching will declare bankruptcy and run away. This would work if someone was willing to give the council a down-payment (of say $1billion) that would guarantee that they an put it back, but unfortunately all the schemes proposed so far mostly involve paying using the recovered money.
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Re:Oak Island Redux (Score:4, Interesting)
You have to promise to put it back after searching, otherwise you leave a massive mess where the old landfill was.
No that's not the issue. The issue is that beyond a few feet deep a landfill is literally on par with a major hazard facility where digging through it could result in anything from asphyxiation, to poisoning, to explosions due to the nature of how landfills work. You don't just go in with a backhoe and some immigrant labourers and start digging, people can literally die.
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buy the old one. Then they can do whatever they want.
Turns out that no you cannot simply do whatever the heck you like even if you own it. All the environmental laws still apply.
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Pay the city open a new landfill and buy the old one. Then they can do whatever they want.
Almost not quite. Owning the land would let you choose what you want to do with it,
but ultimately Permitting and the use of licensed contractors would still be required.
If safety concerns and hazards are Not addressed to the satisfaction of the government
permitting agencies, then you still get Denied the ability to move forward with a construction/
excavation project, even if you own the land.
Even if you Own the land
Re: Oak Island Redux (Score:3)
Um...I don't think the EPAs jurisdiction stretches quite that far.
Re: Oak Island Redux (Score:5, Funny)
Are you really saying that EPA and state equivalents don't issue regulations and permits to operate a landfill to private entities that operate landfills?
Do you even know what the EPA does?
He's saying that the EPA, an agency of the USA govrenment, doesn't have jurisdiction over a landfill in Newport, Wales.
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Um, what state is that in?
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Apparently Britain has become a US state. Biden really worked under the radar on that one!
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I mean, I'm not sure if I'd give him accolades or condemn him for that one. It'd certainly be an epic achievement though!
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E.T./Atari Landfill Story 2.0
For all intents, that hard drive is gone and unrecoverable unless it was disposed of as whole computer, in which case it was likely crushed anyway, but maybe the seals might still be intact. If it was disposed of as "a drive" then I guarantee it's unrecoverable, because the actual jostling of being kicked around by heavy machinery likely ripped the PCB apart, not to mention knocked the physical heads off the drive.
Like if I was in this person's shoes, I would reach out to someon
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It's also possible that the drive gets found, the
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and if it is recoverable, split it with the 'owner', and then they can do whatever they want with the landfill after.
Read: bail and leave town, leaving taxpayers to clean up the rest of the mess they left.
Re:Oak Island Redux (Score:4, Interesting)
It will be gone. Sure, the drive is sealed but the ground there is not very nice to stuff. Acidic soils, rain dripping through layers of toxic chemicals, etc. And it's going to be very hot. Those seals will break down, guaranteed, and once there's a small bit of seepage the platters are ruined. I doubt he purchased a mil-spec hard drive.
I work with some water meter manufacturers, and they go to great lengths to make sure things are fully protected because they say those pits are brutal on the cases and electronics because they'll be sitting in a pool of all the runoff from the alley, lawns, asphalt, salt, etc. I don't think hard drives are tested by storing them in an alkaline bath for a few months, its just not the environment they're expected to operate in.
Humm, what is the chance you can get the data off? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Humm, what is the chance you can get the data o (Score:4, Interesting)
There is absolutely no way that the platters aren't compromised. Even if they had an identical drive/controller, you aren't getting anything off of them. This guy stinks like Craig Wright, promising he has a hidden treasure so that he can borrow money against it, and never have to pay it back until the treasure is found, which it clearly wont, ever
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I don't think it would be all that unusual. The aluminum isn't going to care much about being in a landfill. If it's a sealed type even better, but even an air filled one might not have too much rust on the platters. I expect for six billion dollars you'd extract the platters and read them with an atomic force microscope.
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Is the landfill dry? (Unlikely.) If it's not dry, the aluminum is soup. If it is dry, you've got a small chance. You DON'T store aluminum under water. Especially not water that's at all acidic. A quick check shows that there ARE protective coatings, but It's quite unlikely that a random hard disk would have had those applied.
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The metal will be toast. You'd need a mostly internet metal to survive a landfill, like gold. Consumer hard drives are not built for durability in extreme environments, and a landfill is an extreme environment.
Landfills aren't exactly full of rotting garbage (Score:5, Interesting)
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I would not be terribly surprised if it turned up more or less unscathed.
I agree with you on the "unscathed" thing. But I don't think it will ever "turn up", unless archaeologists happen to find it at some point in the far, far future.
Re:Landfills aren't exactly full of rotting garbag (Score:4, Interesting)
All depends on the landfill. That was many years ago, when they didn't understand as well and just dumped and moved on. Now they generally turn and even harvest gas off landfills, which leads to far more decomposition than in the past. Really depends on where it is and the level of activity that dump sees.
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But metal is a bit different here. The problem with that anaerobic landfill is that bacteria aren't breaking down organic matter. But other chemicals in the landfill will definitely affect steel and aluminum. Primarily water, and not good clean water but water that's seeped through all sorts of toxic stuff. Landfills are rarely dry, and unless they have some weird rules in Wales about cement layering, the rainwater will seep down.
Inflated value (Score:5, Interesting)
Any hard drive that has been in a landfill for that long is worth exactly $0 because the unknown and toxic soup of liquified trash waste will have seeped through the paper air filter into the casing and physically ruined the medium.
This is all unbelievably stupid. Maybe they should find someone with any knowledge of data recovery to testify whether a hard disk is likely to survive being crushed and exposed to what's in the landfill before they start talking about disturbing the waste and potentially causing environmental disaster while going on this 21st century treasure hunt.
No need! [Re:Inflated value] (Score:2)
This is all unbelievably stupid. Maybe they should find someone with any knowledge of data recovery to testify whether a hard disk is likely to survive being crushed and exposed to what's in the landfill
No need! There is an army of slashdot data recovery experts who will give their expert opinions for free!
Re:Inflated value (Score:4, Interesting)
Landfills are toxic sites that over the ears in the best case become highly hazardous due to anerobic decomposition creating highly hazardous pockets of methane. They aren't just a disaster to dig through, they can be a disaster many years later. We have many documented cases of explosions *near* landfills not even directly in them, or on landfills which have been poorly remediated. When the waste is disturbed pockets of entrapped gas can be released.
That is the best case. Tell me what you do with your used bottles of bleach, vinegar. empty paint tins, chlorine, empty container of HCl used to dose your pool? Many things end up in a landfill that shouldn't, and you don't just run explosive or environmental risks, but also risks of releasing things such a chlorine gas, or H2S to say nothing of the primary dangers of the shit that ends up in landfills.
There's a reason you don't go digging in landfills. It's hugely frigging dangerous, not just to yourself but to the community around them. The CDC published a book that is nearly 100 pages long just on the risks of landfills.
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Seems easy. (Score:5, Interesting)
Add up the complete cost for the worst case scenario. Assume you have to excavate every last piece of landfill, unless layering and stratification can provide a viable boundary. Factor in risk pay for the team, appropriate safety measures, salaries, insurance, environmental measures, contingency plans, and the purchase of 100% of the gear needed to implement them. Create this cost estimate considering a long, careful time period.
Ask him to pay the estimate up front, in full, with no guarantee of success.Have him sign off for liability of overruns.
And since the drive is government property, propose a 70/30 split of the liquidation of the coins on it, if successful. 40 to this fellow, of course.
Re:Seems easy. (Score:5, Informative)
Ask him to pay the estimate up front, in full, with no guarantee of success.Have him sign off for liability of overruns.
There are precedents for this. Landfills are occasionally searched for bodies. We have such a search going on right now.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada... [www.cbc.ca]
Initial estimate suggested the search could cost between 80 and 180 million dollars (CAD). Not that I am advocating searching for lost bitcoins, but indeed if the guy can come up with the money up front and get the required permits I'd say have at it. I expect he can't do so, and there is no other way I would even consider proceeding.
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Ask him to pay the estimate up front, in full, with no guarantee of success.Have him sign off for liability of overruns.
There are precedents for this. Landfills are occasionally searched for bodies. We have such a search going on right now. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada... [www.cbc.ca]
At least that's a legitimate reason.
In this guys lost Bitcoin case, it's of his own making. I mean, there is such a thing as "data backups".
"Offsite backup" then? (Score:3)
And the bad news is, that was his data backup, in the landfill.
I guess it became his "offsite" backup then. Good on him for following proper backup procedures!
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There are precedents for this. Landfills are occasionally searched for bodies. We have such a search going on right now.
You don't need to find the body in a good condition. Just the teeth are sufficient for identification and they are very riobust. OTOH, a HD, or just its magnetic surfaces, will need to be workable.
Re:Seems easy. (Score:4, Informative)
Such a search was carried out fairly recently in the UK for a missing person - they knew he went into the landfill because theres cctv of him climbing into a bin to sleep, the bin was collected the next day, and the weight if the bin was above average for that bin on that occasion by an average human weight.
Despite knowing when he went in to the landfill, the general location of where dumps were done that day, and extensive searching over a several year period, they found nothing.
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There are precedents for this. Landfills are occasionally searched for bodies. We have such a search going on right now.
You don't need to find the body in a good condition. Just the teeth are sufficient for identification and they are very robust. OTOH, a HD, or just its magnetic surfaces, will need to be workable.
No disagreement here, though I should point out this local case is about recovery not investigation. We know who the victims are and the killer is already convicted.
I guess the obvious easy way to search for a metal object - magnets - is probably going to be a no go with an HDD, but it is still probably going to be easier to look for visually than sorting human from animal remains, of which there is apparently aplenty.
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https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/landfill-search-digging-winnipeg-womens-remains-1.7398566 [www.cbc.ca]
What ever happened to the time-honored Canadian tradition of feeding your victim's bodies to pigs [wikipedia.org]?
Buy the landfill (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's not his to sell, he could change that.
Buy the whole landfill and everything in it. The owner doesn't want to sell it, so you'll need a juicily fat offer. Ok, so do that. Make it big enough (and get the next step right, next paragraph) and they'll accept it. The council will be funded forever, maybe even paying a dividend to its constituents.
Design a safe process to sieve through it, in order to not externalize costs upon the innocent. I'm sure it can be done, even if it's more work than most people can easily imagine. I'll be frightfully expensive, but still less than $8 billion, right?
So total up the cost of the land and process. Then find a rich investor who will estimate the probability of success and multiply it by the $8 billion that will be gained. Which is a larger number?
Re:Buy the landfill (Score:4, Interesting)
At least in some countries you can just bribe the officials. In the West, though:
"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing."
-Thomas Sowell
BUY WITH WHAT!?!?? (Score:3)
Buy the whole landfill and everything in it
Again: buy with WHAT?!? No bank's going to advance him credit backed by "lost Bitcoins"
I'll be frightfully expensive, but still less than $8 billion, right?
That's assuming the end result is 100% guaranteed that they'll find it, and be able to extract data out of the harddrive. I can't even begin to calculate the odds of that happening.
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Those odds! (Score:2)
He doesn't need a bank. Just somebody with an extra half a billion around who thinks they might earn a return.
Those odds though. And as someone else here said, it'd be closer to a $billion deposit to ensure they don't bail out on some bankruptcy. Also consider it's actually $800m value, not $8b like was published.
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It's probably a lot less than that if he tries to convert it into cash. How much would the market handle without collapsing?
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Councils in the UK dont work like that.
There will be laws limiting exactly what they can do within the landfill, including when and if they can disturb old areas - given the age of the disk here, its likely that the area it went into is now capped, and disturbing it will have severe penalties related to release of pollution etc.
He cant buy the landfill.
New landfills are pretty much forbidden now, and any process for creating one would have to go through a massive legal process and probably involve multiple
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Well, shoot. So much for the legal option. I guess sneakily tunneling in from below is the way to go.
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You can't just buy a landfill in the UK. You have to show you can manage the land and not pollute the local area.
not pro bono (Score:5, Informative)
pro bono means for the public good(generally for no fee or a low cost).
What his legal and data recovery teams are doing is closer to no win no fee where a win in this case means
a)getting permission to dig up the landfill to search for the drive
b)finding the drive
c)getting data from the drive
d)being able to access the bitcoin
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OTOH, the "data recovery specialists" aren't on the hook for anything if he doesn't hand them the drive. So it's free PR if they think it worthwhile.
Math? (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't 8000 bitcoin worth about $800 million, not $8 billion?
Re:Math? (Score:5, Informative)
Wouldn't be the first time! (Score:2)
Isn't 8000 bitcoin worth about $800 million, not $8 billion?
Yup. Wouldn't be the first time [slashdot.org] these type of story pushers failed at math.
Re:Math? (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't 8000 bitcoin worth about $800 million, not $8 billion?
You clearly don't understand how value is calculated in the crypto world.
It is much more complex than a your primitive multiply-two-numbers algorithm.
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No, a British Billion is 10^12 :-)
An American Billion is 10^9 - which is (or used to be) called a British Milliard
I am guessing 10^15 would be a Billiard
Not sure what a Snooker would be
Re:Math? (Score:4, Informative)
False. The long billion hasn't been used in the UK officially or for the most part even informally for over 50 years. The British billion is no different from any other English language use of the billion.
The remnants of the long billion are now relegated to translations in other languages.
e.g. in German they still use eine Million, eine Milliarde, and eine Billion to mean 10^6, 10^9, and 10^12 respectively.
fuck off (Score:5, Funny)
absolutely no one cares. stop running this story every 8-12 months, NO ONE FUCKING CARES
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Re:fuck off (Score:4, Insightful)
Now taking odds on whether they'll run it again *today*.
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Now taking odds on whether they'll run it again *today*.
Damn, we could start betting some money around this stuff
again? (Score:3, Interesting)
Slashdot posted about this hard drive a few weeks ago. Is the plan to dupe this every time the price of bitcoin ticks upward?
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Slashdot posted about this hard drive a few weeks ago. Is the plan to dupe this every time the price of bitcoin ticks upward?
Yes. [slashdot.org]
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Who cares? (Score:2)
Seriously.
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The taxpayers who are funding the council's counsels.
What If (Score:2)
What happens if the drive is found in an unrecoverable state? Are those coins gone forever? If so, what about the other coins that have been put onto drives that get lost or destroyed?
How about the case where the coins are recovered? What's going to happen to the value of coins if they try to cash out that many?
Re:What If (Score:4, Informative)
One of the things majorly wrong with society (Score:5, Insightful)
This sums up a major part of what is wrong with economics today, a major waste of resources even if he doesn't win and for what? Nothing will be produced, have massive environmental impact. All it could possibly l end up doing is transferring wealth from on person to another who did nothing of value in the first place.
To me it sums up economic model has devolved into, produce lots of useless stuff simply to transfer money around.
Re:One of the things majorly wrong with society (Score:5, Insightful)
This sums up a major part of what is wrong with economics today, a major waste of resources even if he doesn't win and for what? Nothing will be produced, have massive environmental impact. All it could possibly l end up doing is transferring wealth from on person to another who did nothing of value in the first place.
To me it sums up economic model has devolved into, produce lots of useless stuff simply to transfer money around.
It's more than just what is wrong with economics. It's a testament to how fundamentally we as a society have lost the thread on what's important. The mere possibility that maybe, however infinitesimally small the chance, there *might* be a way to generate wealth, however large that wealth may be, and even up against nearly impossible odds, all of these people are willing to throw seemingly endless resources at trying to find this drive rather than do something either positively productive for society on the whole, or at the very least, mentally stimulating and enjoyable for themselves or those they know. Wealth and the pursuit of wealth has become such an obsession for our entire society/societies, that NO amount of absurdity is too far to reach. Nothing exemplifies why humanity is failing quite like this story. We care far more about the artificial construct of money than we do about anything else, even sanity and decency. If this were a just world, the very first time this case came before a judge it would be laughed off and everyone involved would be charged with wasting the court's time, even if they have to make up that charge in order to do it. Frivolous will need a new level added to it to even come close to what this case is.
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The mere possibility that maybe, however infinitesimally small the chance, there *might* be a way to generate wealth, however large that wealth may be, and even up against nearly impossible odds,
Agree completely. Now pardon me while I go buy my lottery ticket.
It's for the kids' education, after all. (Not really. Most goes to fund programs for homeless meth addicts.)
Most lotteries help fund social programs (Score:2)
Agree completely. Now pardon me while I go buy my lottery ticket.
It's for the kids' education, after all. (Not really. Most goes to fund programs for homeless meth addicts.)
I know your comment is meant to be sarcastic, but in most places where there are lotteries, a portion of them help fund social programs. So yes you're actually doing some good, even if potentially to your own detriment.
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So yes you're actually doing some good, even if potentially to your own detriment.
I wouldn't mind so much if Washington State could fund some social programs in Los Angeles County, for example.
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all of these people are willing to throw seemingly endless resources at trying to find this drive rather than do something either positively productive for society on the whole, or at the very least, mentally stimulating and enjoyable for themselves or those they know.
That's pretty on brand for Bitcoin, seeing as how the mining process itself is exactly that: throw seemingly endless computing resources towards hashing pointless math equations in order to randomly find the next block, and you're competing against everyone else who has exactly the same idea. All the money and resources spent on cryptocurrency could go towards things that directly benefit the economy, instead it's just producing something so rich folks (and temporarily embarrassed millionaires) can play a
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You're picking on a single weird example from weird sector, and forgetting that nobody is digging through garbage because the authorities keep telling him to fuck off.
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But doing something that everyone agrees is socially beneficial is extremely difficult.
Pro bono... (Score:5, Informative)
You keep saying that phrase. I do no think it means what you think it means.
The're working on contingency, not for the good of society.
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Something in favor of an Irish singer?
At least I think he is Irish, he was singing with Clannad on their track "In a Lifetime"
Re: Pro bono... (Score:3)
I was as looking for this comment; at least I didn't have to through the dumpster for this one
He should be arguing in the public square (Score:2)
8 Billion Dollars is a lot of money for a city of only 161,000 people.
It's almost $50,000 / person.
What he should be doing is running for Mayor and/or council, on the platform of bringing $4B of investment into the town if elected (so he can recover the drive)
Let's try to see whomever runs against him, win.
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He could try. Newport doesn't have a directly elected mayor - if they have a mayor at all it's a ceremonial position. The council is run by a leader and 50 other councillors. So he would need to win a council seat and have 25 other councillors support him. As the current councillors don't seem inclined to support his position, he would need to get 25 of his friends to stand and win - or at least get enough to do a deal with one of the main parties. The other issue is that the next election isn't until May 2
Re: He should be arguing in the public square (Score:2)
You can pay a lot of people to sift through hard drives for a chance at $1B.
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What he should be doing is running for Mayor and/or council, on the platform of bringing $4B of investment into the town if elected (so he can recover the drive)
Being a local councilor doesn't make him dictator of the region. Not a chance in hell the EA would ever give permission to him.
Dumb question (Score:2)
If the guy claims he has 8,000 Btc, shouldn't the ledger show a block of 8,000 coins which were all created at the same time and have consecutive numbering (however it's done)? Or do you have to have the coins to cross-reference the ledger?
My point is, if someone can show a block of 8,000 all being created at the same time and in consecutive order, that would at least lend a tiny bit of credence the guy isn't a loon.
Pull this article (Score:2)
Guy can drop dead (Score:2)
Pay for the environmental assessment and reasonable project plan to mine the landfill without letting anything leach out or blow away, and without impeding normal landfill operations. Show you have the money to fund the project according to the approved plan. Pay for insurance to cover any risk.
NOW you can complain if they won't let you dig.
Otherwise, DIAF.
Digging is "illegal". Riiigghhhttt.... (Score:2)
I'll wager that if he were to give his research and location guesses to the town, all of a sudden those pesky "laws" wouldn't matter as much. Hell the city would probably commence digging at dawn the next day.
As with anything, the legality of the act depends much more on who benefits than on any manner of principle.
Reality (Score:4, Informative)
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So what ? (Score:2)
Another great reason to sort trash (Score:2)
In CA when you throw stuff in your trash can it gets semi-sorted at the transfer station. Trash that's in tied off bags commonly just gets landfilled without being opened, but if it was loose in the can then it will get separated. A hard disk would probably be thrown (actually, that is) into a recycling bin where it would very likely be damaged, and then it would be recycled (the platters and chassis anyway) and then it wouldn't be in the landfill in the first place.
That's not what pro bono is. (Score:3)
What bugged me at first about this write-up was the use of "pro bono." These lawyers aren't working pro bono, IE free. They're working on contingency. Not in any way the same thing.
Second, there is zero proof of what this guy is saying. And given the fact that he's suing the city council for *SIX HUNDRED MILLION,* no reason to believe it.
Re: (Score:2)
There are all sorts of legal restrictions about landfills and what you can do there. Many of them are designed to avoid spewing toxic debris all over the area. Your plan is illegal. The council seems to think that even it, the group running the landfill, doesn't have the right to go digging in there.