Quest for lost hard drive with £4m stored bitcoins

Soldato
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BBC News said:
A Newport man has visited a landfill site in south Wales hoping to find a computer hard drive he threw away which is now worth over £4m.

James Howells' hard drive contains 7,500 bitcoins - which is a virtual form of currency for use online. This week, a single bitcoin's value hit $1,000 (£613) for the first time, making his collection worth $7.5m (£4.6m).

BBC correspondent Hywel Griffiths spoke with Mr Howells about what happened.
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I feel for this bloke! Must be the worst feeling in the world!

Assuming the drive is a traditional hard disk drive it would surely be nackered beyond repair anyway, that is if it wasnt already crushed in a compactor before being sent to landfill... If he does find it then the portion of the disk that contains the bitcoins would need to be 100% intact, as I understand bitcoins are basically a complex encryption algorithm so it's not like you could recover parts of them like you might be able to with unecrypted files, music, photos etc...

The odds are certainly stacked against him, but if it was me of course you would have no choice but to search the whole site!
 
I read this yesterday. I bet someone at the landfill or en route to landfill stripped the bits for scrap and then wiped the drive for use in their own system.

What I don't get is how the guy mined loads of coins using his laptop?

Edit - what has this to do with Graphics Cards? :p
 
Im thinking shenanigans also, Even if it was when they were only worth approx £30 then with 7.5k coin with still a fair chunk of cash you woudlnt just "forget" about
 
The original article said he did it some years ago then stored his hard drive in a desk and forgot what was on it before throwing it out.

Point is, the difficulty level a few years ago would have been so low that a laptop GPU could have quite easily mined them.
 
You would be one ****ed guy with yourself if its true however.

It could be... the general notation with mining is to have a separate PC to store your 'wallet' on to the one for your using for mining... for security lol.

You would set up your 'wallet' on any given PC and get your wallet ID... a very long number... you could then have bitcoins sent to this wallet from any place you bought them, cash out from a pool you have been mining with to them, have a mate send some to it ect ect.
 
You would be one ****ed guy with yourself if its true however.

It could be... the general notation with mining is to have a separate PC to store your 'wallet' on to the one for your using for mining... for security lol.

You would set up your 'wallet' on any given PC and get your wallet ID... a very long number... you could then have bitcoins sent to this wallet from any place you bought them, cash out from a pool you have been mining with to them, have a mate send some to it ect ect.

That's just a transaction address. The wallet this article is no doubt referring to is the offline .dat file variety.
 
Well he could have bought loads when they weren't worth anything. Poor bloke, on the upside though, less bitcoins in circulation raises the value of everyone else's.
 
It does seem highly dubious. I don't know if pools were around at the start but solo mining 7500 coins on a beefy GPU would take ages - let alone most **** mobile GPU's. If the guy did buy them when they were dirt cheap why did he 'forget'... hmmm *rubs chin
 
In an interview on the radio he said he had the laptop running for a week and his missus was fed up with the noise the laptop fan was making so he switched it off. I've never mined so don't know if you can make 7500 coins in a week on a laptop.
 
Doesn't stand a chance! Makes me wish I mined back when I would have my pc on 24/7 though.

Agreed, I used to fold (and download) and thinking back even to the start of the year would have amassed quite a few coins. I don't think anyone would have predicted their current price though this soon.
 
im ignorant about bit coins but its a word i have heard off more and more, what exactly are they and how the hell do they work???

same goes for lite coins wtf is this lol

if any one can explain how and what and why i would be grateful :)

oh ouch to the guy who lost his unicorn skygod pixie money to the evil bin dragons??

im soooo drunk and confused :)
 
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