News Lost hard drive leads to £4m Bitcoin treasure hunt

Discarded drive with 7,500 Bitcoins is somewhere on a rubbish tip in South Wales.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2013/11/27/lost-hard-drive-leads-to-4m-bitcoin-treasur/1

 

Your link points to the wrong article - much as I'm interested in ebuyer's "12 days of Christmas" competition, it's not quite what I was looking for...

 

cheers, fixed.

 

I read it on reddit, from a guy who know's a guy, or at least knew his online personality for a few minutes.

It's definitely legit.

 

I watched a documentary about a serial killer where they dug up a place like this to find a dead body and found it but a hard drive, pfff.

£4 million lost ..silly man.

 

I'm more intrigued about something called a "recycling center" putting laptops in the ground. Do they intend to grow new one?

 

Indeed. And given the odds of finding said laptop, I'm assuming it's not the only one they buried ...

Gonna be a hell of a crop full of spindle platters coming up in the spring ...

 

So Bitcoins are locally stored? I've never looked in to it before but surely that would make it fairly easy to copy and replicate?

 

If you had the wallet and backed it up you could then put it on another machine, I believe that would then make the old one invalid once the chain had been updated?(im no expert though).
But without access to the bitcoin wallet as far as I know there is no way to get it back, its lost currency forever.

I got on the bandwagon a few years ago and started mining, back then it was considered quite difficult and I managed to get 8 bitcoins, sold them at about £15 each and made a nice little profit, just before the price went down to about $2 each.

Obviously I wished I kept them till now and kept mining more constantly, could have paid off the mortgage by now, but hindsight it a wonderful thing

 

Heh, tried mining on my computer a few days ago and it worked out I would be getting one bitcoin per few years... prob not worth it

 

WHo knows? This is what everyone is saying, gave up because they weren't worth enough to start with, then got a bit hard for what you get, now a bit coin is worth a thousand dollars. If the growth carries on, one bitcoin could be worth ten grand in two years. Won't you wish you did it then?!

 

You do make a point, but at the same time do I really want to spend several years of computer working hard gambling on that? If I were to do it I would buy a rig that can bitcoin mine on its lonesome

 

well it all changed when some company started building asci computer miners. Specialised hardware built for mining, far superior to any set of graphics cards or normal servers.
They cost 15k when they first came out. This was when bitcoins were about $10, you would expect to get your money back in about 6 months mining, assuming the bitcoins stayed at around $10.
I guess those who forked out 15k for those rigs are laughing now. most likely millionairs.

 

Surely he wiped the hard drive before disposing of it?

 

Yes and No:

The "coins" themselves are in the blockchain (associated with addresses), which every computer on the bitcoin network has. To access those coins (i.e. to "spend" them in a transaction, which is essentially transferring them) you need to have the correct key to the address that holds the coins. The keys to addresses are what is stored in a wallet, i.e. on your harddrive (nowadays the wallets are encrypted etc., you can even have offline wallets operating on computers that are never connected to the internet, which is done to keep your keys safe).

You can't really invalidate a wallet -- you can however transfer everything out of the addresses the wallet has access to, making a wallet useless. The default client keeps appending new keys (generated randomly) to a wallet as necessary (you generate a new address every time you transfer coins, i.e. you tend not to reuse addresses), meaning a backup wallet can get outdated if you've transferred any coins since the backup-- however there are alternative clients which have deterministic wallets etc. so you can even have a paper backup from which all your keys can be generated.

Bitcoin as a network / transfer mechanism is actually quite fascinating. Whether or not it will be useful/widely adopted in the real world is a completely separate topic though...

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-25134289

also in the BBC news...so there MAY be an ounce of truth in this after all...

 

He should've put it under his mattress

 

I mined bitcoins back in 2011, I think I had about 10. My hard drive got corrupted. Time to dig it out...