• Abe Froman@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    There is no way he would ever find it, it would be like looking for a hard drive in a landfill.

  • Syldon
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    1 year ago

    By the time he finds it, he will be able to afford a Mars bar and maybe a can of pop to go with it.

  • Flyberius [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    This arsehole lost his whole family chasing his golden goose. What a prat.

    Oh, and to try and sell the council on his plan to dig up the entire landfill, he offered to use some of the money to build a school. A school that teaches kids how to invest in crypto…

  • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    What this guy apparently doesn’t seem to realise, is that a landfill isn’t just filled with rubbish. Animal waste gets sent there too. His hard drive could literally be buried in a ton of dog muck.

  • Infernal_pizza@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Can someone who knows crypto ELI5 how this can even happen? Surely your bitcoin isn’t literally stored on a single hard drive? Otherwise if it fails you just lose everything. Or you could just clone the drive and you’d have twice as much. There must be a way to back it up or something

    • notabot@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      The bitcoin isn’t stored on the harddrive, it’s on the bitcoin blockchain, but he stored the key needed to access it on only that one harddrive. Without that no-one can access it.

      • Infernal_pizza@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That makes a lot more sense. Presumably you can back up the key however you like to avoid situations like this?

        • notabot@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Absolutely, but do mske sure the backups are secure, anyone with access to them can move those bitcoins.

        • cynar@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You can. However, it’s easy to not bother, particularly when bit coin were a few pence each. Now the price is sky high, it’s suddenly worth millions.

      • FrankTheHealer@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        So TLDR, he stored the password or an equivalent to the password on a hard drive, and this password is needed to access the Bitcoin

    • LordWarfire
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      1 year ago

      Bitcoin are associated against addresses which are held in wallets. To transfer coins away from an address (i.e. to spend them or to sell them) you need to create a transaction on the blockchain - as part of doing this you need to “sign” the transaction with a private key associated with the address which holds the bitcoins.

      In this case the guy doesn’t have an extra copy of his private key so cannot transfer the coins - he still “owns” them but cannot transact them. It’s like having gold bars locked in a safe but you can’t remember the combination - except the combination is so huge that the chances of guessing it are effectively zero.

      Most people who hold more than a trivial amount of bitcoin will have backups of their private key or use mnemonics to remember it but in the early days when 8,000 bitcoins were worth pennies there was no real incentive or knowledge that it was a good idea to keep backups of the key.

    • Chariotwheel@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      The bitcoin are noted in the blockchain belonging to X. The thing that identifies you as X is saved on the drive.

      And yes, that is a cautionary tale about making proper backups.

    • Flax
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      1 year ago

      Basically you have a bitcoin account. That account has a username and a password. You can share the username to have people send money to your account. However you can only send money yourself if you know the password to the account. He had his only copy of the password on the hard drive. So if you make two copies of one, you just have two copies of the password to the same account.

      What’s so special about it is that it’s not centralised. With maths you can generate a declaration using your password to attach to your username saying you are sending money and that everyone should update their records. These cannot be faked without a password.

      A lot of cryptography and maths goes into it. And the passwords are long strings of random letters and numbers that you cannot choose, same with the username.

  • G4Z
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    1 year ago

    No way that hard disk is going to be recoverable after 10 years unpowered.