Lost Bitcoins Man is still trying

Sankari said:
'Buy bitcoin', they said. 'It's the most secure currency in the world!', they said. 'No need to worry about theft!', they said. 'Safer than cash or a bank!', they said.
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"They" being mostly the bitcoin grifters, and get-rich-quick merchants (the overlap of those two groups is pretty much 100%).

A good number of people who looked into it rolled their eyes and had nothing to do with it. A few who gambled on it made decent amounts, some entirely by luck, others by basically defrauding the less well informed (the greater sucker/fool). The vast majority lost.

Then there's the cost to the environment of a system which by design tries to be as wasteful of energy as possible.

Man, I hate crypto. It was and always has been a form of gambling, and a very destructive one, rife with criminality, fraud, scams, hustles, you name it.
 
Honestly this guy is just plain dumb! something worth that much just doesn't get, chucked about the house!
How about putting something that valuable in a safe? Unfortunately I've no sympathy for him what's so ever.

No common ******* sense seriously! People are skint right now and this guy is still going in about his lost money! due to him being plain ******* stupid!
 
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burtie said:
Honestly this guy is just plain dumb! something worth that much just doesn't get, chucked about the house!
How about putting something that valuable in a safe? Unfortunately I've no sympathy for him what's so ever.
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It wasn't particularly valuable when he (or his ex) threw it away, bitcoin has increased in value rather a lot since then.
 
burtie said:
Honestly this guy is just plain dumb! something worth that much just doesn't get, chucked about the house!
How about putting something that valuable in a safe? Unfortunately I've no sympathy for him what's so ever.

No common ******* sense seriously! People are skint right now and this guy is still going in about his lost money! due to him being plain ******* stupid!
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Tell us you haven't read the full story :)

Clue, it was worth virtually nothing when he took it out of his laptop.
When it was worth something he went to look for it and realised what he had done.
 
jaybee said:
I take a different outlook. If it 100% went to that landfill site, the chances are very good, if you have the resource to search every possible piece of rubbish. He is talking about AI to help speed up search. Hard drives are surprisingly tough. Some of the platters are actually quite thick and hard to break. Yes some of them shatter easily, but some are thicker. Hard drives are both fragile, and tough. Fragile in that the mechanical arm/seek stuff can break down easily, but the actual platters can be fine. Different drives that are similar can be borrowed for the PCB/electronics to aid recovery. There are lots of methods. He could use specialist recovery firms such as the guy in the youtube vid.
There is every hope they could be retrievable. People want him to fail because people naturally hold no sympathy for others winning like on the lottery etc.
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Iirc, when this story first came out, I'm sure he said it was an old laptop drive - those are the ones that shatter most of the time, I guess the platters in them are either thinner for weight savings, or made from a coated glass/plastic.

I don't get his whole claim that AI is going to given them an area to dig - one would assume that the "AI" needs to be fed variables to make a suggestion; such as the date it was disposed of at a tip, the date it was taken to landfill, location etc etc etc - but surely, if the Council make a mistake with any of that data, his AI hopes are dead in the water.

I haven't followed the story religiously - but has this chap even given his wallet ID or anything to backup his claim that there are these millions buried out there? Or, because it is offline, does it work differently (I'm not a Crypto bro)?

I'd love to see him recover the funds, but it has always sounded like a complete lost cause since day one, and the recent threats about sueing the Council, just make him sound like an utter **** if I'm honest. I cannot imagine what it must feel like, to know that a life changing amount of money, that's yours, is buried away somewhere - and I myself would probably want to dig it up too. But it got thrown in a tip - as soon as it leaves your hands, you sort of lose any claim on it. I binned some old bike leathers a while back, would I be allowed to sue the Council as I now want them back?

I appreciate this is a sweeping example, but it feels like that's the straw he's clutching onto now, along with the whole defence that his other half binned it without his consent etc, how are the Council to know that? They just provide the tip, what gets thrown away shouldn't be any of their concern imo
 
Scort said:
Iirc, when this story first came out, I'm sure he said it was an old laptop drive - those are the ones that shatter most of the time, I guess the platters in them are either thinner for weight savings, or made from a coated glass/plastic.
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Pretty much everything about a laptop drive is thinner/more fragile than the desktop version, from the platters to the actual housing from memory.
Desktop drives are still usually made out of what seems to be moulded metal shells that are several mm thick (something like 3mm) with a thinner top cover*, IIRC laptop drives are normally quite thin metal all over, closer to the top cover of a desktop drive in thickness/material as they have to get the entire laptop drive and electronics in a space that is 7-9mm high, you can almost fit an entire laptop drive in the space a desktop drive allows for it's PCB.

I suspect after what is it, 10-15 years of a drive being in landfill the jokey "spinning rust" description of mechanical drives is going to be very literal.


*I don't think the main "shell" of desktop drives has changed much in 30+ years, I have a sneaking suspicion that they haven't changed at all as it's far cheaper to design the internals to fit the same space than change the shell (as you can reuse the moulds, and much more of the existing production line if you're just changing the platter, read heads and motor).
 
mrk said:
I remember when bitcoins were a few quid each. I was on the fence at the time and chose to buy PC parts from OcUK instead of buying several bitcoins.

SAD.
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I wouldn't worry too much, 99%+ of people who bought back then didn't hold until they were millionaires either.

Plenty just cashed out and bought computer hardware when the play money they spent a few quid on became worth as much as a GPU. Even crypto fans would tend to have cashed out when they had say a flat/house deposit.

Ironically it's stuff like forgetting about having some on a drive or being the victim of a hack at an exchange and then having the BTC holding returned several years later that would be needed for the average person to get rich from it even if they had bought really early. It's only a few die-hard crypto people who really bought back then and held.
 
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Scort said:
I don't get his whole claim that AI is going to given them an area to dig - one would assume that the "AI" needs to be fed variables to make a suggestion; such as the date it was disposed of at a tip, the date it was taken to landfill, location etc etc etc - but surely, if the Council make a mistake with any of that data, his AI hopes are dead in the water.
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The AI is the scanning software, they already know the area they want to dig up.
When the rubbish is put on the conveyor the AI scans it.
 
SexyGreyFox said:
The AI is the scanning software, they already know the area they want to dig up.
When the rubbish is put on the conveyor the AI scans it.
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That sounds rather like a bit of pie in the sky, as you'll need to very carefully separate the stuff for any "AI" to have a hope of ID'ing it, you wouldn't be able to put a bag of rubbish on at random, you'll need people or equipment (and it'll almost certainly be humans) to prep the junk so that it can be placed in such a way that the "AI"* isn't looking ad a random clump of junk that is stuck together and likely not the colour it was trained to recognise.
The fun bit of it will be that they won't be able to use a lot of the normal methods to automatically assist in sorting rubbish, they can't use water to break it apart on the conveyor belt (or float off the light stuff) because that'll make an already hard job worse when it comes to any data recovery, they can't use magnets to separate the metallic waste from the non metallic waste because those electromagnets will not be kind to the drive etc.


*Is anyone else getting tired of everything being "AI powered" these days, when what they normally mean is something along the likes of "it's got some image recognition software" or "it's machine learning".
 
Werewolf said:
That sounds rather like a bit of pie in the sky, as you'll need to very carefully separate the stuff for any "AI" to have a hope of ID'ing it, you wouldn't be able to put a bag of rubbish on at random, you'll need people or equipment (and it'll almost certainly be humans) to prep the junk so that it can be placed in such a way that the "AI"* isn't looking ad a random clump of junk that is stuck together and likely not the colour it was trained to recognise.
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It says in the video they have to separate it but the size can be put into the AI and help with viewing it when it goes past.
 
dowie said:
I wouldn't worry too much, 99%+ of people who bought back then didn't hold until they were millionaires either.

Plenty just cashed out and bought computer hardware when the play money they spent a few quid on became worth as much as a GPU. Even crypto fans would tend to have cashed out when they had say a flat/house deposit.

Ironically it's stuff like forgetting about having some on a drive or being the victim of a hack at an exchange and then having the BTC holding returned several years later that would be needed for the average person to get rich from it even if they had bought really early. It's only a few die-hard crypto people who really bought back then and held.
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"Paper millionaires" they are. How many people could actually turn their Bitcoin into $$$? The answer is almost certainly not all of them. The value of the Bitcoin is dependent on speculation and entirely dependent on being able to find buyers.

All very well saying, "My Bitcoin are worth 10 trillion!" but it's meaningless until you can find people to buy your Bitcoin for that amount.

You often hear about the "lack of liquidity" or that Bitcoin is only backed by Tether, another currency invented out of thin air, based on IOUs. And that if everyone tried to sell, the value would tank.
 
Werewolf said:
That sounds rather like a bit of pie in the sky, as you'll need to very carefully separate the stuff for any "AI" to have a hope of ID'ing it, you wouldn't be able to put a bag of rubbish on at random, you'll need people or equipment (and it'll almost certainly be humans) to prep the junk so that it can be placed in such a way that the "AI"* isn't looking ad a random clump of junk that is stuck together and likely not the colour it was trained to recognise.
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That's just a case of putting it onto a conveyor belt so it can go under a camera, hardly pie in the sky.

FoxEye said:
"Paper millionaires" they are. How many people could actually turn their Bitcoin into $$$? The answer is almost certainly not all of them. The value of the Bitcoin is dependent on speculation and entirely dependent on being able to find buyers.

All very well saying, "My Bitcoin are worth 10 trillion!" but it's meaningless until you can find people to buy your Bitcoin for that amount.
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But no one is saying that nor does anyone have 10 trillion in BTC but for 100 million or 200 million, or whatever this guy ends up with if he does recover the drive it's relatively trivial for him to find people to buy his bitcoin. It's a liquid asset so talk of paper millionaires is rather silly, technically true but it's not equity in some unlisted startup, it's wealth that's quite easily realised (if not lost in a rubbish tip).
 
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