He lost the coins in 2013 or before. The price was then $15 or even lower…
If he just bought 100 BTC for only $1.5k im 2013, he’d now have 10 million dollars…
It’s a needle in a haystack, but that’s a really valuable needle. It might actually be worth it.
If my math is right then he would have had to have $117k in bitcoin at that time to have $780m now. That is a lot of money to lose even back then.
I hate this timeline.
What if this hard-drive is actually not within this landfill ;P
What if it is and it became unrecoverable ages ago?
it would be kinda funny that he actually found his drive again. But the data is indeed fully gone.
What are the chances the hard drive would still be readable, I wonder?
It depends how it was stored. If it is just raw dogging the garbage pile? The odds get very low but, theoretically, it is just a matter of very carefully the drive before booting it up. Think “data forensics”
If it was stored in a plastic bag or box? Then it is about as safe as a drive in your closet that you haven’t spun up in over a decade.
the only reason I’m not this guy is that my hard drive was landfill long before it arrived at the dump and was exposed to the elements for over a decade.
also my wallet was encrypted and there is no way in fuck I’m remembering the longest password I ever used.
I mined on CPU so what I lost was then pennies that currently amount to hundreds of billions so if there was even the smallest chance it could be recovered I’d be in this headline.
You’d be surprised what’s recoverable, especially if it’s an HDD.
There was a recovery service I could send customer drives to that could recover a drive in a fire, flood, buried, shattered etc. The question was, how much did you want to pay for the service. One quote came back over 75k.
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
What are the odds that even if he finds that thumb drive that it even still works? LOL buy it dumbass, let us all know how that works out for you.
What it a thumb drive? I thought it was a hard drive. Might even still be attached to the motherboard in a desktop.
If it’s a traditional hard drive with moving parts the chances of it still working are zero. Data recovery maybe possible if the platters are still somewhat intact but I doubt he’d even find it to begin with.
It’ll likely be ruined either way. Municipal waste is a mix of solids and liquids that gets crushed, shoved, and tumbled around before being compacted down by heavy treads and buried in layers. Anything electronic is likely to be damaged in all that.
Very low. I think he dropped below the break-even point on this several years ago.
Thing is, the drive increases in value all the time.
That thumbnail though, lmao.
Old memes, hot nudes and millions in bitcoin, Har D. Drive achieved all of it. “My treasures? You can have yhem if you’ll find them. Come find them in the abandoned privatized landfill!”
I’m Cap’n Raw D. Awg and imma be caPn oh the piRarates!!!
Humanity’s greatest modern tragedy plays out in a Welsh trash heap. A decade-old hard drive—now worth $780 million—rots beneath layers of bureaucratic concrete and renewable virtue signaling. The council’s solar farm isn’t green energy—it’s a middle finger to crypto’s original sin, converting mined regret into panel wattage.
Howells’ desperation transcends greed. This is archeology for the apocalypse, sifting through diapers and coffee grounds to resurrect a digital pharaoh’s tomb. Offering $13 million to desecrate a landfill? Peak late-stage capitalism: valuing hypothetical ones and zeros over actual waste management.
The legal system’s verdict? “Lol, no.” Property rights dissolve when you’re up against municipal PR stunts. That hard drive’s entropy now fuels more than just regret—it powers garbage trucks.
greatest is quite a stretch
Oh, you’re right—forgot the /s. Clearly, a $780 million treasure buried under bureaucratic arrogance and greenwashing isn’t a tragedy. It’s a comedy! Who doesn’t love watching late-stage capitalism turn potential fortune into landfill fuel? Peak entertainment.
What ever happened to the dude who had millions of coins stored on a password protected drive that he forgot the password to and was on his last attempt to unlock it?
I think he hired someone who found an exploit that then allowed a brute force technique at it actually got unlocked . The person hired got a percentage of the money.
That guy’s a nut. All that effort would be better spent doing something useful with the money he keeps blowing.
