• @Carmakazi@lemmy.world
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    3 months 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.

      • @hansolo@lemm.ee
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        273 months 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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      423 months 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.

      • scops
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        393 months 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.

        • @thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org
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          93 months 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

        • @jdeath@lemm.ee
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          43 months 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

        • @Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
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          03 months 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…

    • metaStatic
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      313 months 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.

      • @SupraMario@lemmy.world
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        93 months 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

    • @Gerudo@lemm.ee
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      63 months 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.

    • @NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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      63 months 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.

      • @Screamium@lemmy.world
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        123 months 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

        • @thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org
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          23 months 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.

          • @prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works
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            53 months 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.

      • @HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world
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        43 months 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.

  • @Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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    423 months 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.

    • @Lumiluz@slrpnk.net
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      223 months ago

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

    • @Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      173 months ago

      It’s spent like a decade in a rainy landfill in Wales.

      Even if he finds it, it’s fucked.

      • @bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net
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        43 months ago

        Landfill design is really interesting, and hard drives are very well sealed and aluminum. It would be sitting in a fairly well drained spot, if the seal was not perforated during compaction there’s a good chance the platters are readable.

        • @catloaf@lemm.ee
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          33 months ago

          Hard drives are not sealed, unless they’re helium drives. They have breather holes to equalize pressure, and rubber seals around the data in interface that can degrade.

          And that doesn’t count being crushed in a garbage truck or other heavy equipment.

    • @Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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      93 months 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.

      • ivanafterall ☑️
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        83 months 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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        43 months ago

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

  • @RegalPotoo@lemmy.world
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    113 months 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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    93 months ago

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

      • melroy
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        33 months ago

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

  • @Etterra@discuss.online
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    63 months 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.

    • @catloaf@lemm.ee
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      33 months ago

      Very low. I think he dropped below the break-even point on this several years ago.

          • @finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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            12 months ago

            Yeah but theres no way of knowing if its viable or not at this point, so the only known factor is the value of BTC and the cost of money spent searching for the drive. Even if it fails break even (cost > value) that changes over time.

    • @finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Was it a thumb drive? I thought it was a hard drive. Might even still be attached to the motherboard in a desktop.

      • FireWire400
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        2 months ago

        If it’s a traditional hard drive with moving parts the chances of it still working are zero. Data recovery maybe possible if the platters are still somewhat intact but I doubt he’d even find it to begin with.

        • @Etterra@discuss.online
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          32 months ago

          It’ll likely be ruined either way. Municipal waste is a mix of solids and liquids that gets crushed, shoved, and tumbled around before being compacted down by heavy treads and buried in layers. Anything electronic is likely to be damaged in all that.

  • Altima NEO
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    53 months ago

    That guy’s a nut. All that effort would be better spent doing something useful with the money he keeps blowing.

    • ivanafterall ☑️
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      3 months ago

      He’ll find it just before the end of his life, having ultimately spent $780,000,000.01 to succeed.

  • DUMBASS
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    53 months ago

    What ever happened to the dude who had millions of coins stored on a password protected drive that he forgot the password to and was on his last attempt to unlock it?