In a tale that seems stranger than fiction, a man's 12-year quest to recover a lost fortune in Bitcoin has come to an abrupt end. James Howells, a British IT worker, has been forced to abandon his search for a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoins, worth an astonishing $800 million…
It is worth the try. That is a generational wealth.
It’s also a futile attempt. In the off chance they even find it, that hard drive would be toast by then. In a landfill, that hard drive would prob be shattered and in pieces, not to mention probably corroded and unreadable.
Shattered? Very unlikely. Corroded? Maybe, but probably not since hard drives are well sealed.
They would just need a section of the platter to be readable, they area with the sector that has the data they need. Even if the platter was shattered it would be possible to read the block you need.
The chances are low but the reward is worth the effort.
Hard drives, except for helium-filled ones, actually have an air hole in them with a filter attached to it so they can keep enough air in the drive so the heads can properly fly over the disk surface. Completely possible that moisture ingress would be an issue after years of sitting in a landfill in who knows what. It is a darn tiny hole though.
Yea but only one way to find out. Making massive assumptions when 700 mill is on the line seems dumb. Never give up.
Oh yeah, I’d still try too. Once rescued a phone from a saltwater beach. It sat there buried for 6 months ish in saltwater. Was able to extract all the data from the MicroSD card and find the owner to give them their lost pictures and such. Would still try, despite knowing the science.
Unrelated, f cell manufacturers for removing MicroSD card slots.
I’d wager all the machine compacting and shredding they do at a landfill would render any harddrive broken. Maybe it survived, but after all these years, I highly doubt it survived being expoded to the elements anyways
Have you ever seen a modern landfill? For one thing they crush the contents by constantly rolling over it with a steamroller with spiked wheels that’s designed to shred & compact the trash as much as possible. Then there’s corrosive materials in the garbage that mixes with rainwater to create a leechate that will corrode other garbage as it seeps through it.
I’d be shocked if a standard hard drive could survive a decade in such an environment.
It’s quite amazing how much data can be recovered from hard drives that have been even in fires. I think they recovered like 95% of the data from the hard drives on the challenger shuttle that blew up.
I’m sure those drives were highly specialized and protected like the “black box” data & flight recorders in aircraft. They almost certainly weren’t off the shelf drives from Seagate or Western Digital…
https://bringingcolumbiahome.wordpress.com/2017/03/20/columbias-black-box/
Magnetic tape.
That was Columbia, not Challenger, but if they were still using tape in 2003, they were definitely not using desktop drives in 1986.
Well sure if it started off as bread
I feel like this is an argument of Expected Value.
Ex. if the harddrive has $X on it, and there’s a Y% chance of finding it over the course of a lifetime, then the expected value of the search is X*Y). But if Y is so low that it would take 10 lifetimes to have a better than 50% chance (we’ll say a 6.5% chance if you searched your whole life), it doesn’t matter if X is $742 million (so that the Expected Value is about $50 million) or $742 billion, it’s still objectively a waste of a life.
Just being a Bitcoin user 12 years ago was a ticket to generational wealth.