2y ago

Man spends 10 years persuading Newport council to let him dig through landfill site for £130m of buried bitcoins.

www.mirror.co.uk

'My ex threw out my £130m fortune - now the council won't let me dig it up'

35 comments

There is no way he would ever find it, it would be like looking for a hard drive in a landfill.
- The 21st century equivalent of the 1700s phrase 'like looking for a needle in a haystack'
  
  https://youtu.be/UBNXDXNOKlo?si=I8zz7Wwkqiskv_12
Man's been selling this story for at least 3 years.
- "The real treasure was the interviews we sold along the way"
- Nah, 10. Right from the onset.
I remember when it was 250m
- So does he!
By the time he finds it, he will be able to afford a Mars bar and maybe a can of pop to go with it.
This arsehole lost his whole family chasing his golden goose. What a prat.
Oh, and to try and sell the council on his plan to dig up the entire landfill, he offered to use some of the money to build a school. A school that teaches kids how to invest in crypto...
- Step 1: Invest in Crypto
  Step 2: Don't Throw Away the Hard Drive with the Crypto
- A school that teaches kids how to invest in crypto...
  That's how 99% of techbro "philanthropy" goes.
What this guy apparently doesn't seem to realise, is that a landfill isn't just filled with rubbish. Animal waste gets sent there too. His hard drive could literally be buried in a ton of dog muck.
- I'm sure he realizes that. Why wouldn't he?
  He simply values the chance to find that money more than the disgust of going through trash
  
  This has been going on for years. Every time his story is in the media, he brushes the health aspect aside. The council has brought it up repeatedly, but he either doesn't understand, or doesn't care.
- Could be worse. Could be pig manure.
  
  Aren't pigs herbivores?
Can someone who knows crypto ELI5 how this can even happen? Surely your bitcoin isn’t literally stored on a single hard drive? Otherwise if it fails you just lose everything. Or you could just clone the drive and you’d have twice as much. There must be a way to back it up or something
- The bitcoin isn't stored on the harddrive, it's on the bitcoin blockchain, but he stored the key needed to access it on only that one harddrive. Without that no-one can access it.
  
  That makes a lot more sense. Presumably you can back up the key however you like to avoid situations like this?
  
  So TLDR, he stored the password or an equivalent to the password on a hard drive, and this password is needed to access the Bitcoin
- Bitcoin are associated against addresses which are held in wallets. To transfer coins away from an address (i.e. to spend them or to sell them) you need to create a transaction on the blockchain - as part of doing this you need to “sign” the transaction with a private key associated with the address which holds the bitcoins.
  In this case the guy doesn’t have an extra copy of his private key so cannot transfer the coins - he still “owns” them but cannot transact them. It’s like having gold bars locked in a safe but you can’t remember the combination - except the combination is so huge that the chances of guessing it are effectively zero.
  Most people who hold more than a trivial amount of bitcoin will have backups of their private key or use mnemonics to remember it but in the early days when 8,000 bitcoins were worth pennies there was no real incentive or knowledge that it was a good idea to keep backups of the key.
- The bitcoin are noted in the blockchain belonging to X. The thing that identifies you as X is saved on the drive.
  And yes, that is a cautionary tale about making proper backups.
- Basically you have a bitcoin account. That account has a username and a password. You can share the username to have people send money to your account. However you can only send money yourself if you know the password to the account. He had his only copy of the password on the hard drive. So if you make two copies of one, you just have two copies of the password to the same account.
  What's so special about it is that it's not centralised. With maths you can generate a declaration using your password to attach to your username saying you are sending money and that everyone should update their records. These cannot be faked without a password.
  A lot of cryptography and maths goes into it. And the passwords are long strings of random letters and numbers that you cannot choose, same with the username.
No way that hard disk is going to be recoverable after 10 years unpowered.
“The value of the coins is still viable and will grow over time."
But it hasn’t…
- It has though, quite tremendously in the last 10 years.
- It actually has, tremendously.

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