• @OwlPaste@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • @kungen@feddit.nu
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      641 month ago

      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…

      • @brsrklf@jlai.lu
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        311 month ago

        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.

        • @0x0@programming.dev
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          11 month ago

          Their only motivation is greed.

          Gee, i’m so glad brick ‘n’ mortar banks are different… oh, wait…

            • @0x0@programming.dev
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              11 month ago

              Last time i checked banks and “regulating” bodies are run by, you guessed it, groups of individuals.

              • @brsrklf@jlai.lu
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                11 month ago

                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.

        • @rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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          41 month ago

          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.

  • @mogoh@lemmy.ml
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    1291 month ago

    I remember hearing about this guy years ago. He probably is now devoting 10 (?) years of his life (I did not look it up) searching for his lost bitcoin, but I have got the feeling, that he will never find them.

      • @overload@sopuli.xyz
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        1 month ago

        This is such a monkeys paw. You have a drive with $500 million USD of Bitcoin, but the drive is somewhere in the local landfill.

        Such a curse, I can’t imagine the regret they feel every day getting up for work.

        After 10 years though, isn’t it just gone/destroyed? Rain/corrosion would have destroyed the drive by now.

        • TimeSquirrel
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          571 month ago

          It’s already corroded from the factory…hard drive platters use iron oxide. Can’t rust rust. The mechanical bits may be trashed but the platter can most likely still be read with specialized recovery equipment.

            • TimeSquirrel
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              81 month ago

              I mean, companies exist specifically to do this for other big companies, I’m sure there are security procedures, background checks, NDAs and everything that needs to go with that.

            • @weew@lemmy.ca
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              1 month ago

              Data recovery specialists exist, and nobody would pay for them if the data they were recovering wasn’t, you know, valuable enough to pay a specialist to maybe retrieve it. They probably deal with multimillion dollar industrial/financial/business secrets all the time, and do it discreetly, or else their business wouldn’t even exist.

        • @FireRetardant@lemmy.world
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          291 month ago

          If he had kept his seed phrase for his wallet, he would be able to recover the funds to a new hard drive. This was very common advice if you did a little bit of research before purchasing btc. I can’t judge too much though as I ignored a dogecoin wallet when they were worthless but 500,000 doge suddenly felt less worthless once doge pushed past 5-10 cents, but by that time, my wallet was gone and I had lost my seed.

        • FlashMobOfOne
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          1 month ago

          I have a friend in NY who lost a thumb drive with bitcoin on it in 2011. Every year or two he goes a little nuts and searches his entire apartment for it, but obviously has never found it. I think he threw it away and doesn’t remember, but the exercise of searching helps him exorcise the demons.

          I put about 10% of my investment portfolio in bitcoin, personally. It’s way too volatile, at least for me, to go in big, but I can trust that every 3-4 years people are going to go insane buying it and the price will spike. If you’re already invested you can benefit.

            • FlashMobOfOne
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              81 month ago

              I s’pose.

              But compared to the silly geese who take an extra mortgage out to dump into crypto every time it hits an ATH, it’s nothing.

          • @rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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            31 month ago

            I had a fraction of Bitcoin mined, not bought, in early years when you could do that on a desktop PC. It was so unimportant for me, that this is the first time I’ve remembered about this. I suppose it costs now enough to care, but I still don’t.

            While

            he goes a little nuts and searches his entire apartment for it, but obviously has never found it

            happens to me with searching for childhood’s toys, old drawings, attempts at poetry. But not this.

        • @SparrowRanjitScaur@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          The thing is, if he had access to his hard drive at any point in the last 10 years or so he would have sold his Bitcoin long before it was this valuable, like many, many other people who used to own Bitcoin and aren’t currently millionaires. The fact that he lost his hard drive is the only reason it’s actually worth anything.

          • @overload@sopuli.xyz
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            61 month ago

            That’s a really good point. So many of my friends who used silk road would be multimillionaires if they didn’t spend the btc.

        • @Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz
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          1 month ago

          I had a hard drive with five Bitcoin. Gave the old Gateway PC to a felon buddy who was down bad and trying to rebuild his life learning some coding way back in the mid 2010’s.

          He threw the computer away for a new one. At the time it was 10,000 bitcoin for a pizza so never cared. I chuckle about it now, but it’s gone forever.

        • @nutsack@lemmy.world
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          11 month ago

          they bury it in dirty diapers and then they go over it with the crazy steamroller that has spikes on the wheel to make sure everything’s nice and flat

    • @mbirth@lemmy.ml
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      71 month ago

      I’m so glad I’ve spent my 2 or 3 bitcoins back in the early years for some 60€ software…

      • @rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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        11 month ago

        This feels similar to cyberpunk “I’ve been a corporation once, kids” stories, and something about gold rush.

  • @Teknikal@eviltoast.org
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    521 month ago

    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.

  • Todd Bonzalez
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    431 month ago

    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.

  • @limitedduck
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    321 month ago

    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?

    • @Euphorazine@lemmy.world
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      761 month ago

      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.

      Landfill video

  • DoctorButts
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    291 month ago

    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?

    • @jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
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      241 month ago

      500 million justifies using some very fancy data recovery means, as long as he’s sure it’s the right drive.

  • @Fedizen@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    🎵Money for nothing and checks for free🎶

    bitcoin is just gambling and yall dropped your lotto ticket.

  • @Wahots@pawb.social
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    231 month ago

    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.

  • @Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca
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    131 month ago

    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.

  • @Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
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    81 month ago

    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.

  • @Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee
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    31 month ago

    The new El Dorado.

    Still, I’m not sure why the council are addressing their statements to “Whales Online”

  • @biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works
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    31 month ago

    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…