back to article Man who binned 7,500 Bitcoin drive now wants to buy entire landfill to dig it up

Denied permission to excavate a landfill in search of his missing Bitcoin, Newport, Wales resident James Howells has a new plan: buy the soon-to-be-capped dumping site outright from the city council. Howells inadvertently discarded a hard drive in 2013 containing what he claimed was 7,500 Bitcoins (though some reports suggest …

  1. thedarkstar

    I hope the council and courts continue to laugh in his face at how ridiculous it is.

    I'd love to know who is employer is because they're clearly happy to let him spend a large amount of time in courts, giving press interviews and spending every waking second obsessing over this.

    1. TonyMurphy

      As for his employer, well I know who it was....originally....Capita - LOL

      A quick google image search for "lost+bitcoins+hard+drive+uk" will show him many times in his corporate fleece.

      1. thedarkstar

        Some super-sleuthing there, kudos. And if he worked/works for Capita, that explains a great deal.

      2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

        Sorry, I have just gone through several articles (BBC, etc) and none of them mention anything about his employer.

        One of them does state that the drive was mistakenly discarded by a partner, which leads me to believe that he was at the head of a business, which would mean he was not employed by Capita or anyone else.

        On the other hand, he has learned - the hard way - that you need to backup your data.

        1. Anonymous Coward Silver badge
          Facepalm

          I'm pretty sure that refers to a romantic partner, not a business partner.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            From the linked article:

            "and left it in the hall of his house. His then partner is said to have mistaken the bag for rubbish and taken it with her on a trip to the dump"

            Yeah, business partner is probably not taking out the trash in his house.

    2. DS999 Silver badge

      They would never allow it no matter how much he offers

      It would be an environmental disaster to allow someone to dig up an entire landfill. All that stuff would be exposed to rain that would run off into nearby waterways and so forth. There was a landfill that closed in a nearby town and they turned it into a recreational area. Be a lot harder to convince the town to part with a nice park for a promise giving them 10% of nothing.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The real question

    Isn't whether the hard drive works, but are the bits still on the platters? Scanning SQUID microscopy or Magnetic force microscopy (MFM) while expensive, could conceivably map the magnetism on the platters with sufficient resolution to recover any bits if they are still there.

    1. NewModelArmy

      Re: The real question

      I have seen some news items where the rubbish goes through a high intensity magnetic field to remove the steel based cans and lids.

      Although the hard disks are not made of steel, or the casing is non-ferrous, and will not have been attracted to the electro-magnet, surely its data has been wiped ?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The real question

        There is a very strong neodymium magnet naught but 2cm from the platters, at all times. They spin and spin with this magnet right there. It controls the read/write head positioning, and needs to be strong enough to stop the inertia of a "thing" in just a few milliseconds.

        Take one apart sometime.

        Having a "magnetic field" around a hard drive won't do anything to it, unless, *maybe*, you put a degausser in parallel with the platter, 1cm removed. Maybe the platter itself can conduct enough magnetism to make it work (but not likely).

        I'm honestly more interested in the trucks that collect it, the compactors in those trucks that crush everything together, and the massive weight on top of it in the collection warehouse and then in the hump. Then we have tractors driving over it in the landfill -- the idea that this disk still exists in a viable unit is asinine. You'd have better luck brute-forcing the wallet key, and finding the key based on "what blockchain wallet *still* holds 7500 bitcoins?" If you find the latter maybe you only need a password, and not the wallet - but I'm not a BTC expert.

        1. Jamie Jones Silver badge

          Re: The real question

          Well, there was no truck, as his girlfriend took the bag directly to the landfill tip directly, but otherwise, I totally agree with you. Also, the disk wasn't even inside a computer case.... "It's dead, James, and you should know it."

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_buried_in_Newport_landfill#Disposal_of_hard_drive

          1. ITMA Silver badge
            Devil

            Re: The real question

            He "says" his girlfriend took the bag directly to "landfill".

            In the UK the public don't get access to landfill sites, for health and safety reasons. Neither householders nor businesses (unless they are legitimate licensed waste management businesses) can "take a bag to landfill".

            It will either have been put out for collection by the bin men, or taken to the local recycling centre. Where it will have gone into a demountable tipper truck body, which regularly get compacted down using the bucket of loader (basically squashing it down to make room for more). Or into an onsite compactor where it will be crushed into a container which will then go off to landfill later:

            https://ukwasterecycling.co.uk/products/ukwr-static-waste-compactor-c-w-bin-loader-cage/

            https://gradeall.com/industry-type/councils/

            The idea that his girlfriend wandered onto a council landfill site and just "dumped" the bag is ludicrous. He will only have been able to even narrow it down to an area of the site by investigating when whichever compactor the bag was put into went to the landfill site, and asking the council which area of the landfill loads from which ever router (or recycling centre) were being taken to on that day - and hoping he got it right.

            1. katrinab Silver badge
              WTF?

              Re: The real question

              I can take stuff to the local dump. There is a separate area between the road and the main landfill site where you can hand over your rubbish.

        2. sedregj Bronze badge
          Gimp

          Re: The real question

          I've just recovered some magnets from 2.5" and 3.5" drives. The 3.5 ones are stupidly strong.

          You'll need a full set of star headed screwdrivers/bits in general. Scrape away the silver covers with a flat head to reveal the hidden bolts.

          There will be two curved flat magnets per drive enclosure. You can tap them off their metal frame thing with a hammer and screwdriver or lump and bolster.

          A very strong magnet is quite useful. You can magnetise (or perk up) screwdriver bits. I nearly used them for a sliding door guide - the idea was to pop a mild steel flat strip guide under the floor and embed a couple of magnets in the bottom of the door. Slap one on the end of a rod or whatever and you have a magnetic retrieval tool that will definitely find dropped screws etc!

      2. cyberdemon Silver badge
        Pint

        Re: The real question

        Hopefully an AC electromagnet. That would thoroughly reset the bits, assuming the bin-juice hasn't already lifted the magnetic coating from the platters...

        1. Jamie Jones Silver badge
          Coat

          Re: The real question

          I don't know... Most of the AC stuff on here is useless trolling.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The real question

      I read somewhere it's a laptop hard drive. In which case the glass platter inside might be in a billion pieces.

      1. ITMA Silver badge
        Devil

        Re: The real question

        Especially if it has been driven over by one of those "landfill bulldozers/compactors" with the huge metal spikes/cleats on the huge metal wheels.

        https://secretscotland.wordpress.com/2018/01/20/my-local-landfill-bulldozer/

        Even if an older laptop drive with real metal platters, if one of those (spikey wheeled things) has ran over it, it is not likely to be recoverable.

        1. ITMA Silver badge
          Devil

          Re: The real question

          It gets worse!

          Before ending up in the landfill, it will have been in the back of a council refuse vehicle - colloquially known as "bin wagons" or more commonly "shit carts".

          Inside the back of those (the common rear loaders - other types are available) they have a big steel plate held in position by a big hydraulic ram. Rubbish emptied into the back of said shit cart is then "compacted" (i.e. squashed) against the plate by one or more (typically two) big steel compaction jaws. The ram then moves the plate a little further towards the front of the shit cart to make more space.

          When the vehicle is full (or it's max weight), it then goes to the landfill. The rear hydraulically powered compaction jaws lift up out of the way and the contents pushed out the now open rear using the big steel plate and ram.

          https://busybins.co.uk/blog/bin-wagon-questions

          That pile of compacted refused then gets pushed about and compacted down by the vehicles with the big metal spikey wheels.

          What are the chances of a laptop hard drive surviving that?

          1. ITMA Silver badge
            Devil

            Re: The real question

            Image a laptop hard drive going into one of these:

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye3UsB8wsX4

          2. collinsl Silver badge

            Re: The real question

            To be fair if his partner took it to a dump (collection site) then it may have just been tossed straight into the container which then takes it to landfill - in 3 places my family or myself have lived this is how stuff gets loaded. You drive your vehicle up a ramp, unload whatever, and throw it from height into the back of a 40-odd-foot "skip" with no top on it, sorted by item type. These are then picked up by a lorry with a hydraulic arm when they're full and taken to the correct place (be that recycling or the incinerator or the landfill etc).

          3. jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

            Re: The real question

            As others have pointed out, the girlfriend seems to have taken it to the dump, rather than putting it out for collection by a lorry. Even then, it would probably have gotten compacted at some point, whether by static machine or a vehicle at the final dumping location.

            "What are the chances of a laptop hard drive surviving that?" Maybe better than you would think.

            Rubbish compactors don't crush, it's more like squash (as you say). As a student, I worked for the local council on the bin wagons and from my experience, domestic refuse is quite springy. It certainly bounces back when the lorry is emptied at the tip. Unless you get unlucky and a thing like a hard disk gets caught directly in the jaws of the press, there a good chance the hard disk just got heavily squashed between a lot of nice soft cushioning, stinky rubbish.

            My bin lorry job was in the days before widespread recycling, when pretty much anything you put out at the kerbside would be collected and dumped in the ground. Certain items would warrant some special attention as they went in the back of the lorry. We would clear the back hopper by fully cycling the compactor hydraulics, then put the special item in the rear hopper all by itself. Cycling the compactor once more would indeed crush the item between hard metal plates. Flourescent tubes were fun when they went pop but nothing could beat a big CRT going boom and you could feel it in the cab.

      2. Jamie Jones Silver badge

        Re: The real question

        The guy himself thinks otherwise! :

        "Howells studied the technology behind hard drives and came to believe that the city officials were wrong. Although the covering of the drive was metal, the disk inside was glass. “It’s actually coated in a cobalt layer that is anti-corrosive,” Howells told me. He conceded that the hard drive would have been subjected to some compacting when it was layered in with soil and other trash. But, however rough the process, it might not have fractured the disk and destroyed the drive’s contents."

        Full story: https://archive.is/d1zu5

        1. lglethal Silver badge
          Stop

          Re: The real question

          Yes, because I'm sure his analysis and opinion were completely uncorrupted by the fact that he has a massive incentive to believe the hard drive is fine and can be found.

          Nevermind what the experts all say, he "believes" it will work out in the end...

          He's a muppet, and somehow he has convinced some other muppets to pony up dough to let him try and fight these legal battles, all for the very low possibility that a) they could find the hard drive amongst TONNES of garbage, b) that having found said hard drive, it has not been crushed, corrupted, or destroyed beyond recoverability, c) that the hard drive even contains what he claims it does.

          If there's anyone out there who believes he should be given the chance to try and recover the hard drive... Well I've got a bridge to sell you...

          1. Jamie Jones Silver badge
            Facepalm

            Re: The real question

            I agree entirely. (https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/02/11/bitcoin_drive_landfill/#c_5016591)

            I thought the "!" at the end of my rather sarcastic sentence made it obvious.

            At the very least, it doesn't in any way imply I was agreeing with him. (But cheers to the clueless downvoter anyway!)

    3. smudge

      Re: The real question

      Scanning SQUID microscopy or Magnetic force microscopy (MFM) while expensive, could conceivably map the magnetism on the platters with sufficient resolution to recover any bits if they are still there.

      Even if it did work, and "recovered" some bitcoin, he'd still have to prove to non-techies, with an extremely high level of assurance, that what had been done was genuine, honest and trustworthy, and that he hadn't just made it up.

      Now I suspect that he couldn't just "make it up". And so I'll ask the dumb question. Would he have to recover every single bit of the data for the blockchain to be valid?

      1. Steve K

        Re: The real question

        If he ever found anything, the only proof he would need is if the Private Key to his BitCoin Wallet allows him to access it.

        The Proof would be him moving the coins to another Wallet, which (assuming you knew his BitCoin address) would be evident from the BitCoin blockchain.

      2. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: The real question

        No need to reconstruct the blockchain. That is already public. All he needs is the private key that gives him access to the wallet, multiple keys if there are multiple wallets. It's almost certainly an all or nothing thing. If there's only one wallet, he only needs 256 bits. Possibly 384 bits if it's base 64 encoded or 512 if it's stored in hex, but either way, a couple sectors could be it. To find those sectors though, you'd probably need the file table too.

        1. David 132 Silver badge
          Facepalm

          Re: The real question

          256 bits? Frankly, he would have a higher chance of gaining access to his wallet if he just started ploughing through the possible 2^256 permutations.

          Either is as staggeringly unlikely as the other.

          Unless he pulled a President Skroob and set his private key combination to 1-2-3-4-5, of course :)

    4. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

      Re: The real question

      If the hard drive is there then it can be read, I'm pretty sure of that. Magnetic storage is very durable and reliable.

      Had he stored the data on a SSD I'm convinced it would be gone by now.

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: The real question

        I have a challenge for you. Get an old laptop hard drive. They're extremely cheap these days. Write some data to that drive. Then bury it with no protective arrangements, ideally in a place that gets rained on and next to rotting things for a year. See how recoverable that is when you dig it up. Corrosion is more powerful than you think. Of course, the options of the drive getting smashed or simply being impossible to find are there, but in the situation where you found it and the platter hadn't shattered, you would still have a device that is not in good condition to be read.

        1. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

          Re: The real question

          The hard drive is inside a PC casing and covered with dirt so it's more or less protected from the elements. And it's obviously sealed. I'd give it a fair chance that it's still viable and they can read at least some of the data off it.

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: The real question

            "The hard drive is inside a PC casing": No, it's loose. Try again.

            "covered with dirt so it's more or less protected from the elements": No, not dirt. It's covered in rubbish of many types, some of which is much nastier. Not that dirt is great, because dirt lets water through and water is nasty to hard drives. But I admit that it's probably no more broken now than it has been for years, given that high pressures will probably have slowed some processes that could damage it. The damage it received was probably mostly front-loaded.

            "And it's obviously sealed.": There are several posts here explaining how it's not sealed. Why are they obviously wrong?

            To say nothing of the other ways a hard drive can be destroyed, such as getting crushed by the weight above it or through violent contact with machinery that is not intent on preserving things.

            1. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

              Re: The real question

              I'm not giving any guarantees. I'm just saying it may well be possible to recover the drive and the information on it.

      2. CountCadaver Silver badge

        Re: The real question

        Tell that to my spare aka last resort laptop which only gets turned on when the primary one has suddenly died and then put away again on a dry shelf until it's next needed . Went to test it this week and "boot disk failure" - checked bios....no harddrive showing, removed drive and reseated it. No luck, external caddy tried on desktop....it made hopefulISH noises and even reluctantly gave me 2 drive letters but wouldn't let me access either of those drive letters (and it made very sick sounding noises while trying)

        Not bumped, thumped,.dropped or otherwise touched since it was last used, turned off and put away

  3. simonlb Silver badge
    FAIL

    Oh Dear, Oh Dear, Oh Dear

    I have discussed this option recently with investment partners and it is very much on the table

    What's the ballpark figure for removing and sorting through all that waste and where will that be done? That's one hell of a tenuous "investment" for almost certain failure.

    "The crypto idiocy is strong with this one."

    1. richardcox13
      Boffin

      Re: Oh Dear, Oh Dear, Oh Dear

      An actuarial approach could be taken: chance of finding the drive times chance of working times expectations of bitcoin value dropping.

      Vs. search cost plus recovery.

      Assuming values as claimed, I would expect investors would take those costs times significant multiplier as their cut (multiplier to account for the risks and costs) out first. Assuming costs of anything over £25m he's going to see very little.

      Much like pay-outs with no-win no-fee lawyers.

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Oh Dear, Oh Dear, Oh Dear

        And if he ever buys it, remember to subtract any charges for doing any excavation with zero environmental damage and making him clean it all up afterward. Make sure that money is put in an account that can only be used for that purpose before he takes possession. At that point, let him give it a try; it's not our problem if he wants to waste more of his life on an impossible dream, but we're not letting him break things while doing so.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Oh Dear, Oh Dear, Oh Dear

          Agreed. If he wants to blow all his current money on this crazy attempt, fine. BUT he's expected to pay for it without the (now theoretical) contents of the drive - buying the landfill, performing the excavation, cleanup including fixing any environmental damage accidentally done along the way. And paying up for the legal expenses he's put the council through. Once you've put something in the landfill, it's no longer yours.

    2. katrinab Silver badge
      Megaphone

      Re: Oh Dear, Oh Dear, Oh Dear

      Forget it. He is not going to get planning permission for that.

    3. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

      Re: Oh Dear, Oh Dear, Oh Dear

      I believe he's pretty sane trying to recover almost three quarters of a billion in money. I'd have done the same, no doubt about it.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Oh Dear, Oh Dear, Oh Dear

        Quick, let's bankrupt a local authority and cause an environmental disaster - random guy on internet is "pretty sure" it will all work out.

        You've sure convinced me!

  4. Headley_Grange Silver badge

    Given that the drive belongs to the council now then the price of the land and its landfill is surely going to have to take into account the millions of dollars of bitcoin that are there, isn't it? If I were on the council's selling-land-to-idiots committee then that would be my starting point, and it would start at a lot more than 10%.

    1. katrinab Silver badge
      Megaphone

      Value of bitcoins x probability that they will be recovered ...

  5. Antony Shepherd

    There's a simple solution to all this.

    Give the guy a shovel and tell him to start digging.

    If nothing else it'll give everyone a good laugh to see an idiot in an advanced stage of denial covered in filth trying to dig his way to a hard disk that even if he finds it it'll be stinky and corroded beyond any recovery. He might even learn an important lesson?

    1. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

      Re: There's a simple solution to all this.

      To be fair, that's what he asked for in the first place - the council didn't let him dig.

      Lots of well-deserved japes here, I'm not disagreeing. But if you consider the people backing him might be putting in a hundred thousand or so, with a 0.1% chance of a 50% split on a £500 million return. People bet on much longer odds every time they play the lottery.

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: There's a simple solution to all this.

        Buying a landfill and excavating it, even in the cheapest, most destructive way, is going to cost more than that. Recovering data from a corroded hard drive itself is extremely expensive, because the average data recovery specialists don't see things in the condition this drive would be. Maybe he has found some people willing to make this bet, but if that's all he's raised, he will need more.

        1. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

          Re: There's a simple solution to all this.

          > Buying a landfill and excavating it, even in the cheapest, most destructive way, is going to cost more than that

          Not my area of expertise, but I’m happy to be corrected. You have some odd hobbies… :-)

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: There's a simple solution to all this.

            Not least, they line landfills so that the crud in them doesn't leak out (such as into ground water).

            Excavation may cause that lining to be cut/broken (maybe more than just piling and crushing junk on top of it). Dragging things with the excavator (they'll stick together, you'll get more than just a shovel's worth), being unsure where the boundary is, or how big the objects on top of it are, how much will come up with one scoop - you'd have to approach it with the care of an archeological dig.

            Then the likelihood of a flimsy hard drive surviving excavation with an excavator.. how are they justifying this dig to anyone? I don't get it.

        2. Headley_Grange Silver badge

          Re: There's a simple solution to all this.

          Given the potential environmental impact they'd need him (or the company he sets up) to either escrow or bond enough money to make it good, re-cap it and maintain it in accordance with relevant regs for, say, 25 years. I mean, I'm sure he wouldn't go bankrupt the minute that he realized it wasn't there and leave all that mess dug up, uncapped and unmonitored.....but just in case he gets really unlucky again, you know.

      2. Annihilator Silver badge

        Re: There's a simple solution to all this.

        "But if you consider the people backing him might be putting in a hundred thousand or so, with a 0.1% chance of a 50% split on a £500 million return. People bet on much longer odds every time they play the lottery."

        They do, but I'd say 0.1% is vastly optimistic. Finding a .7kg relatively fragile item in a very compacted 100,000,000kg pile of bin-juice-ridden crap is much lower than that surely. If I'd buried that hard drive at the bottom of my garden in 2013 and knew exactly where it was to dig it up today, I'd still be dubious of the 0.1% odds.

        People bet on longer odds, but they know someone will actually win the lottery.

        1. Ken Shabby Silver badge
          Facepalm

          Re: There's a simple solution to all this.

          I reckon 100,000 on the lottery would be a better bet, though agreed, not a good bet

          1. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

            Re: There's a simple solution to all this.

            Ugh. You made me do the maths, despite the fact I made up both the possible investment AND the chance of a succesful retrieval (which, of course, is up there with the constants in the Drake Equation in terms of unknowns)

            I'd suggested £100,000 invested with a possible return of £250,000,000. The average payout for 5 balls plus 1 bonus on Euromillions is just short of €250,000,000, and tickets are apparently €2.50, so if you bought 40,000 tickets for €100,000 you would have odds of 40,000 in 6,991,908, or 1 in 174 of winning that particular prize (and ignoring the chance of winning any other prize). Just short of half a percent chance.

            So, er... yes, you're absolutely correct. Assuming a 0.1% chance of successful retrieval from the hard drive, you'd be much better off playing the lottery!

        2. gnasher729 Silver badge

          Re: There's a simple solution to all this.

          As an investor, you would have to pay for the search for the hard drive and data recovery, plus the complete cost to put the landfill back into its original safe state. The last amount would have to be put into escrow. Probably with a generous amount extra to guarantee it’s enough with the remaining money returned after successful cleanup. Note the cleanup has to be paid whether you find the drive and recover the keys or not.

          This will not be just a few 100,000. This will be many million that sn investor needs to pay before they get any money back. And there will most likely be multiple hard drives in every landfill. Most unrelated to any bitcoin.

      3. Bebu sa Ware
        Facepalm

        Re: There's a simple solution to all this.

        People bet on much longer odds every time they play the lottery.

        The expectation with P = 1/1000 and return GBP 250 millions is GBP 250,000 which is less than the cost of decent legal spat.

        A least with a lottery you toss a few quid in with basically zero expectation of any return (I have never been disappointed:) and you never know those few dollars might end up in the hands of someone who really needs it thereby doing some good.

        This reality challenged numpty and fellow travellers financing his insanity can only conceivably cause harm.

        If they were to get possession of the landfill I can foresee their excavating the site and shipping the recovered waste to some god forsaken part of the world for sorting.

        1. Irongut Silver badge

          Re: There's a simple solution to all this.

          > shipping the recovered waste to some god forsaken part of the world for sorting

          No need for shipping it is already in Newport, Wales.

  6. nobody who matters Silver badge

    The man appears to be a complete berk.

    He has already wasted a great deal of council money for them to deal with his court actions, and this is council tax payers money, which would be much better used for providing essential services to, you know, actual council tax payers - like mending potholes for a start!

    Quite apart from the question of whether or not the data would turn out to be retrievable from the drive, has he any idea how big the pile of rubbish is that would need to be dug out, and the time and painstaking sifting through that would be necessary to have any chance of finding the drive to start with. It wouldn't have been that easy to find in the original bin lorry.

    1. jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

      "any idea how big the pile of rubbish is that would need to be dug out"

      Apparently a former worker at the tip reckons it would have been dumped in a particular area of the tip that was in operation at the time, an area containing "only" 15,000 tonnes of rubbish.

    2. Jamie Jones Silver badge

      The bag was taken to the tip directly by his then girlfriend.

      More info: https://archive.is/d1zu5

      1. Bebu sa Ware
        Coat

        The bag was taken to the tip directly by his then girlfriend.

        Poetic justice if the young lady tossed the bag into a nearby builders skip. :)

        Being, for presumably unrelated reasons, an ex GF she is likely to have kept mum and is enjoying the subsequent schadenfreude of his discomfort.

        Those who the gods would destroy they first make mad. Looking at the contemporary world the pantheon has been clocking up considerable overtime.

        1. cyberdemon Silver badge
          Devil

          Re: The bag was taken to the tip directly by his then girlfriend.

          The best end to this story would be when the prat has spent millions purchasing a literal dump, the ex missus reveals that she in fact kept the hard drive, and incinerated it

  7. mark l 2 Silver badge

    Assuming he ever gets the drive back it will probably just be in time for the made up fun bucks bubble to burst and his £500m will be worth £50.

    1. Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch Silver badge

      A person turning that many funbucks into legal tender all in one go will probably cause the bubble to burst.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        ... is there a downside?

      2. JulieM Silver badge

        A person turning that many funbucks into legal tender all in one go will probably cause the bubble to burst.
        It's worse than that!

        Buying into cryptocurrency requires you metaphorically to set fire to a pile of real money, to prove (1) you used to have that much and (2) you don't have it anymore. So the only way you can turn cryptocurrency back into real money is to intercept someone wanting to buy in, and swap their pound notes for some of your cryptocurrency before they destroy them. And that also means, you can never cash out more than anyone else wants to buy in.

        1. Terry 6 Silver badge

          I was thinking this. As an investment Bitcoin sound a bit like Timeshares or shared ownership properties*. In that the paper value is dependant on someone being prepared to buy them at the supposed value.

          *There's no market for second hand sales at the proposed value, because new punters can buy new properties.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Even if the HDD was found what are the chances that it would be readable after so much time buried in landfill?

    HDD's platters are not completely sealed, the casing has a small hole for pressure equalisation and whilst there is obviously some sort of filter behind the hole I'd expect groundwater or other liquids present in the landfill to have found their way past that pressure hole and into the platters by now.

    1. katrinab Silver badge

      That's if it wasn't completely degaussed by the big electromagnet they use to pull out steel etc for recycling.

      1. EllieTheEnby

        In the 1980's I had a Seagate 5.25" MFM drive which had begun having data issues. I was inquisitively destructive at age 13 and had a magnet from a large hi-fi speaker that I'd pulled apart for science reasons, and I wondered what would happen if I held that near it. It instantly made the drive completely unreadable, it never worked again and just made head clicky sounds when powered on.

        I kept hold of that magnet and in the 2010's I wanted to securely erase a much more modern 2.5" laptop drive. I tried the same technique again, but the drive remained perfectly usable. I then tried with some tiny neodymium magnets and the drive continued reading and writing even with magnets sat on top of the cover.

        I had to securely erase it with a hammer instead.

    2. jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

      "the casing has a small hole for pressure equalisation"

      Years ago, we had some devices with hard disks in them that would be sealed up, sent off to do their job, then returned a few days later. For reasons not worth going into, the devices were filled with helium. The drives suffered a high rate of failures. When we spoke to the manufacturers, it turned out to be the helium being lighter per molecule than air, messing up head/platter clearance and causing the heads to crash.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Due to the age of the "missing" drive I assumed it was not a helium-filled drive.

        "the helium being lighter per molecule than air"

        The issue with Helium-filled drives (which are sealed and do *not* have a pressure equalisation hole) is that Helium molecules are very small in size and so the molecules can escape through many other materials. I've not sure what the expected lifetime is for commercial Helium-filled HDDs.

        1. Solviva

          Whilst true, my very basic knowledge of gases is that whilst helium is incredibly slippery and escapes almost anything, the point of the helium being there in the first place is it offers lower resistance to the spinning platters compared to regular air. Once the helium leaves, it's going to be a vacuum assuming the drives are sufficiently sealed to not let anything else in - but would helium really want to leave an area of lower pressure (the now leaking drive) to migrate to a higher pressure? That's not what gasses like to do.

        2. This post has been deleted by its author

    3. Judge Dead.

      'Had a hard drive in the slightly hostile environment of my garden shed for 5 years...

      Pulling it apart to harvest the magnet, the plating fell off the platters like glitter....

      It's gone, dude needs to get over it...

  9. ChodeMonkey Silver badge
    Holmes

    Twist In The Tale

    The ex-girlfriend still has it. She's trying to work out how to obtain his passwords.

    1. Bebu sa Ware
      Devil

      Re: Twist In The Tale

      The ex-girlfriend still has it. She's trying to work out how to obtain his passwords.

      Either she doesn't have it or she hasn't heard of lead pipe cryptoanalysis.† One can buy an unimaginable quantity of lead pipe‡ for a few million quid but just a metre of which would be sufficient to break the password or ex BF's kneecaps.

      † obligatory XKCD reference https://xkcd.com/538

      ‡ apparently being phased out but I imagine a scrappy could do a cash deal. Randall's $5 shifter is a commendable substitute.

      1. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge

        Re: Twist In The Tale

        lead pipe...

        A lead pipe was the weapon used in the Lord Lucan case. Lord Lucan was of course never found, despite decades of searching and reports of him being spotted around the world.

        There is one theory that he came back into the country.

        May be the same here/the drive never got thrown away as he was "lead" to believe

    2. bemusedHorseman
      Holmes

      Re: Twist In The Tale

      I guessed similar, but that it's the city council that has it. Either way, Lead Pipe Legilimency will be required to get the password...

  10. Ball boy Silver badge
    Coat

    He's a trailblazer!

    He did to bitcoin what everyone else should be doing. Full marks to him for being well ahead of the pack on that one ;-)

    /mines the one with a copy of 'The dummies guide to backing up your data' in the pocket

  11. david 12 Silver badge

    82 million hard drives per year, for the whole UK

    Which is relevant how? He's not talking about digging up the whole UK, or even the whole dump.

    The argument against diffing up the dump seemed strong until they got to that. Then I start to wonder, if they thought they had an argument, why are they using numbers pulled out of their ass?

    1. Annihilator Silver badge

      Re: 82 million hard drives per year, for the whole UK

      They were trying to demonstrate the scale of the amount of rubbish that gets dumped in a land fill each year. The 82 million hard drives figure was for a single landfill site each year (~58,000 tonnes, or 58 million kg, to one landfill site is the equivalent of 82 million hard disks).

      And yes, he's only looking at a single area of 100,000 tonnes of weight (based on a guy who used to work there..). But that's worse - that's the equivalent of looking in a pile of 142 million hard disks. He's not finding it in that pile.

      1. jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

        Re: 82 million hard drives per year, for the whole UK

        100,000 tonnes of rubbish. If you could thoroughly (and you'd want to be thorough, not slap dash and risk missing it after all this effort to even get your hands on the years-old festering pile of rubbish) search 1 tonne per day, that would still take 274 years. Even if you could search 10 tonnes per day, that's still nearly 30 years.

      2. jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

        Re: 82 million hard drives per year, for the whole UK

        82 million hard disks per year? That's more than 1 per person (baby, adults etc.) in the whole UK per year.

    2. IGotOut Silver badge

      Re: 82 million hard drives per year, for the whole UK

      Because in the area he looked there could be hundreds of similar looking drives. So he could find "his" drive, only to recover a completely different device.

      1. Grumpy Fellow
        Go

        Re: 82 million hard drives per year, for the whole UK

        That gets me thinking. There has to be some way to get a scam going where we send around pictures of a trashy looking hard drive, claim that it is the lost drive, and we just need a small advance fee to do data recovery on it. Obviously for a large return for the investor. If the Lads from Lagos pick up on this, you saw it here first and I want my percentage.

        1. Terry 6 Silver badge

          Re: 82 million hard drives per year, for the whole UK

          I think it's the Lads from Myanmar now

          https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c04nx1vnw17o

    3. Bebu sa Ware
      Coat

      Re: 82 million hard drives per year, for the whole UK

      If you can quantify the number of drives discarded in the UK during the relevant time periods and have some idea of the proportion that were likely to end up in this drongo's chosen tip then you could quantify the number of drives you might recover and therefore the likelihood of recovering one particular drive.

      Even in his nominated 100,000t that could contain 100,000,000kg/0.700kg drives so even if a 100,000 drives were discarded you would still have to sort through 100,000,000 - .700×100,000 kg of shit ie 99,930t and on average examine 50,000 drives before locating the jackpot.

  12. ecofeco Silver badge
    Facepalm

    What an idiot

    How does this man dress by himself in the morning?

    1. Headley_Grange Silver badge

      Re: What an idiot

      "How does this man dress by himself in the morning?"

      He can't cos he puts his clothes in a bin bag to take to the laundry and his girlfriend throws them out. Every week.

  13. The Central Scrutinizer Silver badge

    Bitty Mcbit face

  14. Emir Al Weeq

    Wrong drive?

    I hope he's confident of identifying his drive. I don't think I could tell my sorry square of metal pulled from landfill from someone else's. I got the impression it wasn't in a laptop or something he might recognise.

    I can see him having to pay for expensive forensics on every drive he finds, and if one is unreadable, he'll never know to stop if it's the one.

    1. Annihilator Silver badge

      Re: Wrong drive?

      I assume he's operating under the misapprehension he'll find it in the binbag it was in, and will recognise it from the other contents of said binbag. Sadly, I imagine that got ripped and split at some point in the binning processes.

      1. EllieTheEnby

        Re: Wrong drive?

        Which bin bag, the black one? I think I saw it.

  15. Winkypop Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Has he tried “password123”?

    From Bitcoin mining to Bitcoin mining mining.

  16. Mitoo Bobsworth Silver badge

    "I love the smell of Bitcoin in the morning...

    smells like - garbage."

  17. Ken Shabby Silver badge
    Mushroom

    Someday this dig’s gonna end

  18. WindyRidge

    There is something morally ugly about this story. He Iseems doomed metaphorically to dig through that landfill on his hands and knees for eternity, and that is God's punishment for his avarice.

  19. Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese Silver badge

    Is the needle even in the haystack?

    The whole scheme is predicated on the drive actually being there.

    If it was brought in by hand rather than in a dustcart as part of kerbside bin collection then there's the possibility that it would have been spotted and scavenged by staff working at the tip. They aren't supposed to, but it does happen* that they spot something that they think could have value and for them to keep it for themselves.

    It's not beyond imagination that a worker at the tip decided to help themselves to a free computer, not knowing what was on there.

    * Only just this weekend I took some old electronics and enquired which skip a particular thing should go in - the member of staff said to just give it to him and he'd make sure it went in the right place....and wandered off in the direction of his hut and away from any of the skips

    1. robinsonb5

      Re: Is the needle even in the haystack?

      Where I live, the tip (sorry, "recycling centre") has a policy of actively rescuing items which still have some usefulness, and there's a "re-use shop" on-site.

      1. Dr. G. Freeman

        Re: Is the needle even in the haystack?

        Did that a job once, way back when.

        Most of the time, change a fuse, plug, or just give the insides a good clean, and it was like new.

        Could build a half-decent computer rig from a morning's collection.

        Probably his drive's been collected, wiped, had a linux distro put on it, and sold to somebody for £30 for their kid to use. (what I charged for a recycled PC in 2009)

      2. gnasher729 Silver badge

        Re: Is the needle even in the haystack?

        That’s what you would expect a recycling centre to do really.

    2. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: Is the needle even in the haystack?

      I don't care if they do. I got rid of it. If they want it now, that's theirs as long as I have no more responsibility anymore. It is why I erase things before getting rid of them, though.

  20. DuchessofDukeStreet

    Virtual Currency

    So Bitcoin isn't virtual after all, it takes a physical form...? I'll keep mine in gold please.

  21. This post has been deleted by its author

  22. gdawg

    Advice

    The best bit is that he is getting bitcoin investment advice from a "Business Waste UK waste management expert"

    1. Headley_Grange Silver badge

      Re: Advice

      "Business Waste UK waste management expert" - if they've got an Italian surname then he needs to be very, very careful.

  23. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

    Intact

    There's a very good chance the drive is still viable and (parts of it) can still be read, even after all these years.

    Problem is he still has to a) convince investors to finance the buy of the landfill and b) find the drive and reclaim the Bitcoins.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The next Crypto con ...

    "Invest Squidrillions in my company to buy the Tip and receive a share of the proceeds in the event that we find & recover the Disk."

  25. JugheadJones

    value

    in 2013 a bitcoin was about $13 , wouldn't have been too painful but today it like losing your lottery ticket if you win, very painful

    1. gnasher729 Silver badge

      Re: value

      Getting totally fixated on trying to recover the money instead of living a fulfilling happy life, that is what really hurts him.

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    As Elsa sang

    Let it go.

    Let it go…..

  27. Judge Dead.

    Where (near where) I live, there was a squaddie, who after a night drinking, slept in a cardboard recycling bin (cctv)..

    Bin was collected, (phone pings on the way to landfill), and the body was never recovered..

    Much smaller area to search, and it would provide much needed closure to the family...

    That got a nope, after a few weeks of searching..

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Sell it!

    The council should sell the land to him to him for £50,000,000. Let’s see how serious he is.

  29. Ghostman

    As far as the hard drives working after being in the dump, there shouldn't be a problem as long as the platters haven't been damaged. 1994 we had a flood in our area and the computer lab of a local high school was under water and almost everything was washed away, including all the computers. In 2000 I was handed several of the computers when new bridge construction over the creek was begun to replace the bridge supports and they were found in the mud banks under the bridge. Took the humps of hardened clay and hosed them off until I could get to the case screws. When i removed the case, a perfect clay model of the case was revealed. Again, hosed off the inside. Tore down the chassis (IBM PS/2) and soaked the motherboard in a tub of water and dish soap, scrubbing with a soft toothbrush. Note: red clay is full of iron and would cause some spectacular sparks if not thoroughly clean. Cleaned inside the case, switches, floppy drives (2), made sure the monitor wasn't cracked, got everything clean and shiny.

    Put it back together, plugged it in, and the C_ icon appeared. Told the crew chief to call me if any more showed up.

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    > Newport could have become "the next Dubai."

    How is that enticing at all? Soulless place.

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