Posted on 12/21/2021 12:49:51 PM PST by Red Badger
Whilst doing some Spring cleaning back in 2013, a man threw his old PC hard drive into the trash, which quickly joined the mountain of rubbish at his local landfill site in Newport, Wales, UK. Little did he know at the time, that same hard drive contained a wallet filled with 7,500 Bitcoin, worth a cool £500,000 ($665,000) in the early crypto days. Now? That wallet is worth $357 million.
Once he realized, the man began a desperate search for the hard drive and has been searching ever since. Over the past eight years, James Howells has been crawling through mounds of rubbish in the hunt for his $350 million needle in a haystack – a haystack the size of a football pitch.
video at link...............
"I had a word with one of the guys down there, explained the situation. And he actually took me out in his truck to where the landfill site is, the current ditch they're working on. It's about the size of a football field, and he said something from three or four months ago would be about three or four feet down,” said Howells in an interview with the Guardian back in 2013.
"I'm at the point where it's either laugh about it or cry about it. Why aren't I out there with a shovel now? I think I'm just resigned to never being able to find it."
After that conversation, Howells all but resigned to the fact his fortune would never be claimed. But soon after, he began a search himself and still believes there is hope that the drive is both reachable and readable in its likely deteriorated state. In a last-ditch effort, he has now recruited residents of his local town to join the hunt, with the promise of millions if the search succeeds.
The odds are certainly stacked against him, made worse by the Newport council’s refusal for any volunteers to enter the site. Citing the ecological damage trawling through buried rubbish would cause, a lack of a permit to search the rubbish, and the sheer uncertainty that the hard drive even lays there, the council will not allow anyone to search the mounds, CNBC reports.
Sadly, if Howells can’t find the drive, the Bitcoin is lost forever.
Like most crypto, Bitcoin is untraceable and you couldn’t back-up your wallet in the early days of mining. This has led to unfortunate scenarios where people lose the physical drive the crypto is on, like Howells, or forget their password – such as the man who has just a few guesses left before he is locked out of a $240 million Bitcoin fortune.
I know that the larger the loss, the more it preys on the mind! I inherited some gold coins but they got lost in a move and it did cause some restless sleep BUT that was somewhere in the 4 digits (I hope)! 9 digit losses like this creates the same fever that has people trying for that Oak Island thingy.
Sorry for him but he does need to let it GO!
Had a pre-season bet from a trip to Vegas that the Eagles would win the Superbowl. Lost the ticket. The Eagles made the Big Game... but ran into Tom Brady’s Patriots (2005).
Yeah, I’d have dismantled my house if the Eagles had pulled that one off.
When my father passed some 20 years ago, I got custody of his class ring...one of those big beefy ones with a red stone in it.
I wore it to his funeral down in Arlington, and...when I came home, I couldn’t find it. It had a lot of sentimental value because he wore it every day of his adult life, and would occasionally whack us in our occipital (back of our skull) when he was angry and chewed us out. When we would walk by, he would flick out his hand so the stone facing out from the back of his hand would stingingly hit us there.
It became a source of humor to us kids in the same way the nuns with their rulers did, and I was heartbroken when I lost that ring.
Well, 20 years later, I still find myself eyeballing some old coat or bag with the fleeting thought “Could it be in there?” even though I have probably looked dozens of times before.
And it is only a ring!
I cannot imagine a hard drive with $350 million dollars on it lost somewhere. He probably dreams about finding it, and wakes up with tears in his eyes!
I went over to a guy’s house one time, and he had made a wall hanging out of a lottery ticket from every state in the Union...the one from California had a redwood tree theme, the one from Wyoming had a bucking bronco...and so on.
He told me people who visited him would completely get bugged out and twitchy, asking him how he could have it hanging there and wondering if a lottery ticket inside might have been a million dollar ticket!
I think he kind of enjoyed that...:)
I did the same thing many years ago. It was an external hard drive that my EX-gf threw out. Had to literally get into the garbage bin while my apartment bldg. neighbors looked at me with pity..
Good. That makes the ones I have worth more.
fool .................... money
LOL...no coming back from that!!!
Have you checked under the bed?
What’ll really kill him is if he finds the drive after all this time, but it has a huge bulldozer track shoe imprint or backhoe bucket tooth puncture, and the drive is completely unusable.
Unusable?
HRC purposely used bleachbit and hammers. Finally used a cloth.
None of that did a thing.
Guy must have had some wealth to begin with or he would have been so much more careful with something worth $600+K (with the possibility to increase in value to $350+ million). If I had something worth $600K the size of a computer disk drive, I can guarantee you that it would be in a safe deposit box or other secure place so that boo-boos like throwing it out would be impossible. If possible, I would have also insured it.
It’s a Mad(x4) world came to mind too. Life imitating art (or at least movies).
No. “Password”.
One a landfill is closed, it sits dormant for sixty years. Full attention is maintained at the bore holes for the entire lifetime. At the end of sixty years, then land can be utilized for other purposes. The junk has been pretty much dissolved into clumps of pseudo-minerals.
I know this because I have designed electronics controllers to operate the pumps and residuals sampling systems. Those places make a stink that stays on your clothes. It is best not to come home without changing.
Poetic justice. Worse than that would to be to find a pile of a thousand of them just like it.
That sounds like we well designed landfill in the USA. But are they the same in Wales?
I used to work in “black liquor” pulp mills. It was the same thing there — the stench from those mills would get into your clothes AND into your very body. Ugh. An old engineer once told me to keep apple cores in your car to absorb the stink, but I don’t think that worked.
h/t vk lee
PING!
I spent months in the hospital and rehab after a SCI; had to close my business while recuperating over the following year. My 14 BTC ($400 cost each) were in a Coinbase account, but were tied to my company’s email domain, which expired unknown to me. They were irretrievable. When I started to see BTC going nuts, I tried to access my account to no avail. Coinbase’s FAQ’s and CSR’s were no help at all, try after try after try. I was freaking out!
In a last move of desperation, I wrote a personal letter to the CEO of Coinbase at their San Francisco office marked “Personal & Confidential”, detailing my dilemma.
4 days later, I got a personal call from him, giving me a new login/password for the account! In-effin’-credible!
Long post short, I finally cashed out when BTC was in the vicinity of $20k. Sure, I coulda held on, but what the heck.... a profit is a profit, and I put it to good use renovating my home to be wheelchair friendly. A $.50 stamp and a politely-worded letter paid massive dividends.
Where’s this landfill??
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