After 12 years of research, the man who threw away a hard drive containing $742 million in Bitcoins is forced to abandon his search.
After 12 years of research, the man who threw away a hard drive containing $742 million in Bitcoins is forced to abandon his search.
If he had just bought more Bitcoin right then instead of spending all the time and money fighting this then he'd probably be wealthy now.
It's heartbreaking from a psychological perspective. He felt like those coins were in his grasp, and every month he spent on this search was the one he'd find it. So he kept doubling down. đ
12 Years Ago:
"What are you guys all doing?", "Looking for millions stored on a hard drive."
Grabs metal detector, finds hard drive, wonders if should tell anyone...
Metal detector enthusiast who found a hard drive in the landfill 12 years ago:
"Yeah, I should get around to seeing what's on that."
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.
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.
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.
I'm confused. What's the new development? Isn't this where the story has always been?
He's been suing to get access. This is the end of that.
I once installed Linux to the wrong drive and lost all my files...it cost me $100 for the recovery software and 3 days to recover most of what I lost...and words can't describe how pissed I was...I'm pretty sure if I magnified that by 12 years and $742 million, I would lose my damn mind.
Lmao and lol. Iâll never not laugh at this clown.
Why?
He wasted a decade plus of his life chasing a lost cause.
Because crypto is for clowns and this is exactly why. Fuck around, find out.
The guy: "Obviously you can't recover it without the password. So I'll just hire people to help me search."
Guy he hired: "I'm just gonna try my own luck with this hard drive. Huh it didn't work. Well, I don't want to get in trouble."
lol lmao even
When I lost that $5 bitcoin someone tipped me on reddit in 2011 or so, I didn't cry about it because I'm not a whiner like this guy.
Also it was because I formatted my machine and forgot to back up my wallet since it was my first one, so not as easy to restore especially with the limited knowledge I had at the time.
Just think about all the man hours that could have been dedicated to anything more useful than this waste of time.