• @[email protected]
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    1815 hours ago

    What are the odds that even if he finds that thumb drive that it even still works? LOL buy it dumbass, let us all know how that works out for you.

  • @[email protected]
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    13 hours ago

    He lost the coins in 2013 or before. The price was then $15 or even lower…

    If he just bought 100 BTC for only $1.5k in 2013, he’d now have 10 million dollars…

    • @[email protected]
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      24 hours ago

      It’s a needle in a haystack, but that’s a really valuable needle. It might actually be worth it.

  • @[email protected]
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    1114 hours ago

    Old memes, hot nudes and millions in bitcoin, Har D. Drive achieved all of it. “My treasures? You can have yhem if you’ll find them. Come find them in the abandoned privatized landfill!”

    • Darth_Mew
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      24 hours ago

      I’m Cap’n Raw D. Awg and imma be caPn oh the piRarates!!!

  • @[email protected]
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    3920 hours ago

    This is just a modern iteration of the book HOLES, and it takes place in a landfill instead of a dry lakebed.

      • ivanafterall ☑️
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        1218 hours ago

        Actually, yeah, it’s pretty fun for what it is. 78% Rotten Tomatoes/76% User Score, for reference. 7.0 on imdb.

      • Maeve
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        1018 hours ago

        I never saw it but read it. Yes, 10/10, highly recommend.

  • @[email protected]
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    24 hours ago

    This saga has been a ride so far. There is no way this guy is mentally stable at this point, he is going to do anything and spend every dime he has until he’s either found it or he brushes his teeth with a .38.

      • @[email protected]
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        3023 hours ago

        It all ends with him finding it, wedged under a broken glass pitcher. He cuts himself badly and because he owns the whole landfill, and is nuts, his phone is dead and he bleeds out before he can get help.

    • Coriza
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      4523 hours ago

      I mean, if you notice that you had and lost 700 millions you have to have a really strong mind to not go crazy. If it was me I think I would go crazy.

      • @[email protected]
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        13 hours ago

        He lost the coins in 2013 or before. The price was then $15 or even lower…

        If he just bought 100 BTC for only $1.5k in 2013, he’d now have 10 million dollars…

      • scops
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        4622 hours ago

        It’s a far cry from this guy’s situation, but I think I had five or six bitcoin back when I was mining in the early days. I cashed out when they were maybe $40-50 each towards a new GPU.

        Sure, I could go nuts thinking about what I would do with the money now, but if I hadn’t sold at that rate, I probably would have sold at $100, or $200, or…

        There’s no way in hell I would have had the discipline to “hodl” to this point, so I just get on with my life.

        • @[email protected]
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          618 hours ago

          yeah i lots dozens. and i have an SSD that died with the keys to 5 more. I’m not losing sleep over it

        • @[email protected]
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          1120 hours ago

          I had a few in my digital wallet that disappeared. I’ve looked for it for hours. oh well… when I last accessed it, the rate was probably less than $20 each, so I figured I lost a couple bucks… I would have sold them forever ago so no use thinking about what they’re worth now

        • @[email protected]
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          319 hours ago

          Yeah, but if those Bitcoin were “out there somewhere”, and you’d never have to think about money ever again if you found them…

  • @[email protected]
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    5121 hours ago

    Sad story.

    That’s enough money to have a good life and provide a good life to your loved ones. If he never finds it, he is a crazy man. If he finds it he is a smart man. A normal person can’t earn that much in a lifetime. Even a miniscule chance of finding it could drive someone to obsession.

    For the sake of his sanity, and for a good story, I hope he finds it, but I doubt he will.

    • @[email protected]
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      2520 hours ago

      With his monkey paw luck, he’d find it just as Bitcoin crashes and loses nearly all value somehow

    • @[email protected]
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      1219 hours ago

      Check out Rai stones.

      Although the ownership of a particular stone might change, the stone itself is rarely moved due to its weight and risk of damage. Thus the physical location of a stone was often not significant: ownership was established by shared agreement and could be transferred even without physical access to the stone. Each large stone had an oral history that included the names of previous owners.

      In one instance, a large rai being transported by canoe and outrigger was accidentally dropped and sank to the sea floor. Although it was never seen again, everyone agreed that the rai must still be there, so it continued to be transacted as any other stone.

      • @[email protected]
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        414 hours ago

        My dad lives on Yap for a few years as a kid. My grandparents had a 2’ diameter rai stone until they died. It’s with my aunt now.

  • @[email protected]
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    1718 hours ago

    Humanity’s greatest modern tragedy plays out in a Welsh trash heap. A decade-old hard drive—now worth $780 million—rots beneath layers of bureaucratic concrete and renewable virtue signaling. The council’s solar farm isn’t green energy—it’s a middle finger to crypto’s original sin, converting mined regret into panel wattage.

    Howells’ desperation transcends greed. This is archeology for the apocalypse, sifting through diapers and coffee grounds to resurrect a digital pharaoh’s tomb. Offering $13 million to desecrate a landfill? Peak late-stage capitalism: valuing hypothetical ones and zeros over actual waste management.

    The legal system’s verdict? “Lol, no.” Property rights dissolve when you’re up against municipal PR stunts. That hard drive’s entropy now fuels more than just regret—it powers garbage trucks.

      • @[email protected]
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        417 hours ago

        Oh, you’re right—forgot the /s. Clearly, a $780 million treasure buried under bureaucratic arrogance and greenwashing isn’t a tragedy. It’s a comedy! Who doesn’t love watching late-stage capitalism turn potential fortune into landfill fuel? Peak entertainment.

  • @[email protected]
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    24 hours ago

    What are the chances the hard drive would still be readable, I wonder?

    And keep backups, folks.

    • @[email protected]
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      918 hours ago

      You’d be surprised what’s recoverable, especially if it’s an HDD.

      There was a recovery service I could send customer drives to that could recover a drive in a fire, flood, buried, shattered etc. The question was, how much did you want to pay for the service. One quote came back over 75k.

    • metaStatic
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      3423 hours ago

      the only reason I’m not this guy is that my hard drive was landfill long before it arrived at the dump and was exposed to the elements for over a decade.

      also my wallet was encrypted and there is no way in fuck I’m remembering the longest password I ever used.

      I mined on CPU so what I lost was then pennies that currently amount to hundreds of billions so if there was even the smallest chance it could be recovered I’d be in this headline.

      • @[email protected]
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        1121 hours ago

        Also a cpu miner and it was in the hundredths of a cent per coin when I did it. It sucks but that drive is long gone and not worth it to fret over. It was also in the hundreds of millions at todays cost

    • @[email protected]
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      923 hours ago

      It depends how it was stored. If it is just raw dogging the garbage pile? The odds get very low but, theoretically, it is just a matter of very carefully the drive before booting it up. Think “data forensics”

      If it was stored in a plastic bag or box? Then it is about as safe as a drive in your closet that you haven’t spun up in over a decade.

      • @[email protected]
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        14 hours ago

        it is just a matter of very carefully the drive before booting it up

        I’m curious about what the missing word is. Cleaning? Inspecting?

      • @[email protected]
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        1422 hours ago

        It gets compacted in the garbage truck and compacted some more at the landfill. I think the odds are slim it could be found in one piece

        • @[email protected]
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          320 hours ago

          garbage truck compacting isn’t really that much, check out what it looks like when they dump it. lots of stuff doesn’t get exposed.

          The drive would have been fed to the incinerator where I live. We don’t use a dump, we have a huge waste to power transfer station.

          • @[email protected]
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            620 hours ago

            Compacting at a landfill however ….

            Dumped out of the truck into probably another sorting area where machinery pushes through it potentially prying out large salvage pieces for scrap, or destructively breaking it apart by driving through and over it.

            Over, and over, and over, and over.

            • @[email protected]
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              14 hours ago

              Different landfills have different policies/procedures.

              Like I said, the odds aren’t great. But if there was ever any chance of finding it, this isn’t the kind of system where things are getting cubed every step of the way. And once there is a layer or two of trash above it (making finding said drive nigh impossible), it is going to be pretty protected from even heavy duty constructicons driving over it.

    • @[email protected]
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      524 hours ago

      I would be shocked if it was still readable. He probably had a shot very early on, but now? Seems hopeless.

      • @[email protected]
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        622 hours ago

        a surprising ammount data can be gotten off surprisingly damaged drives, there is always the possibility, thats why it took a delte/write/delete/write process, a rare earth magnet, 3 guys, a sledge hammer, and a industrial shredder to throw away a hard drive in the army.

  • @[email protected]
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    1223 hours ago

    I mean, if he also wants to take on the costs of doing all the remediation work and ongoing maintenance and surveillance for the rest of time that’s probably a good deal for the city

  • melroy
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    924 hours ago

    What if this hard-drive is actually not within this landfill ;P

      • melroy
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        319 hours ago

        it would be kinda funny that he actually found his drive again. But the data is indeed fully gone.