The attitude of Newport council - everyone, really - seems pretty nuts to me. $7 million is about 185 kilos of gold. Imagine what would happen if someone lost that in a rubbish tip!
I wonder how many hard drives are retrieved and then somehow rescued - which may no longer power up so expert help to recover data off the platters is required. Rinse. Repeat.
A soccer / football pitch has an area of about 7140 square metres.
They say the drive could be "3 or 4 feet deep" - let's just call that one metre. So it's only 7140 cubic metres to search.
Admittedly, that's 7140 cubic metres of foul trash. It will include soiled babies diapers, rotting food, female sanitary products, tins, bottles, etc etc.
Assuming you could find the drive at a cost of one million. (roughly £140 per cubic metre) That'd give you 6 million to share between you and the council.
I guess you could add some environmental fixing thing in there (removing any electronics that are found, recycling any glass or metals vent methane, etc, and give them £2m, and keep the rest?
The problem: even if you find the derive after spending all that money, there is a very good chance it is completely unreadable after spending months in a landfill.
Seeing as he has a good idea of when it was thrown away surely that narrows down where it could be quite considerably. He just needs someone to invest some money in finding it with him for a share of the wealth. I wouldn't have given up if I were him.
That's assuming the data will still be intact when the drive is recovered.
Edit: I'd guess the odds of the data still being intact are close to zero. A drive is so fragile I doubt it survived. Consider it being thrown around in a garbage truck and then slowly buried under several feet of other trash. Several inches of trash at a time, over time, with trucks rolling over the area each time. Then, consider the weather and other garbage juices drenching the device.
Hard drives are fairly robust when unpowered and can take quite heavy shocks and still be fine. The drive itself might be fucked but so long as the platters are in one piece there's a decent hope a good data recovery co could retrieve the data. The danger is it got bent or crushed, and that'd be what I'd guess has happened.
He could just buy 100 hard drives, install GPS locators in them, and then throw them out once a week. Then he could calculate the probability that the original drive still exists based on how many of the new ones survive. He might even be able to infer something about its location.
"Howells stopped mining after a week because his girlfriend complained that the laptop was getting too noisy and hot while it ran the programs to solve the complex mathematical problems needed to create new Bitcoins."
Why does every bitcoin comment thread have this conversation? It doesn't matter if a tiny percentage of the currency does not exist in the marketplace or gets lost.
21 million / 0.00000001 = how many bitcoins can "exist".
So considering that there's no real blocking factors in how many bitcoins can be distributed, why does it matter if some get lost?
The value of the coins are hardly affected now that such a high level of adoption has occurred. Those coins weren't even in previous circulation in any marketplaces affecting prices.
The divisibility of the currency doesn't matter for this calculation. Currency represents wealth. There is a finite amount of BTC that will ever be available. Any BTC that is locked away like this means there is less BTC to represent the same amount of wealth (actually, it's a growing amount of wealth presently). This means the value (or potential value) of each BTC has gone up.
I think there may be some confusion on my part in understanding your point. To the second part, BTC loss will hopefully decrease. If loss/theft continues it's represents a significant UX issue that will inhibit the growth of bitcoin.
To your first part, why would 1 BTC lost when it's worth $1000 have a greater significance than 1 BTC lost when it's worth $1,000,000?
EDIT: Unless you mean any individual wallet's share of BTC is likely to be less, in which case the odds of losing as much BTC in a single incident is significantly reduced.
> Unless you mean any individual wallet's share of BTC is likely to be less, in which case the odds of losing as much BTC in a single incident is significantly reduced.
Exactly. The only common narrative of these lost BTC is an earlier ignorance by the owner and a rapid increase in price. That is the only reason "millions" get lost. Once prices stabilizes via increased market cap and average BTC/owner is reduced, this narrative stops being prevalent and large scale.
Ask the Zimbabweans about the insignificance of 14 zeros in your currency. History is littered with far more examples of currency revaluation than long-term stable measures of wealth (in fact precious metals are, possibly, the only example).
So in Zimbabwe, receiving $1,000,000 in the morning was a losing proposition because by nightfall you might sell the same good for $1,000,000,000.
With hyper-deflation, spending $1,000,000 in the morning would be a losing proposition because by nightfall you might buy the same good for $1,000.
Both suffer severe problems, economically, but who loses and who wins changes. The matrix is something like this:
Inflation| Buyer | Seller |
---------+-------+--------+
Early | Win | Lose |
---------+-------+--------+
Later | Lose | Win |
---------+-------+--------+
Deflation| Buyer | Seller |
---------+-------+--------+
Early | Lose | Win |
---------+-------+--------+
Later | Win | Lose |
---------+-------+--------+
Ultimately, neither one is good. In the case of moderate deflation and inflation it's similar. There is less motivation to invest, greater motivation to save under moderate deflation. Moderate inflation increases the motivation to invest, but decreases the motivation to save.
The current market cap is based on the notional value of all coins mined to date x current market value of 1 BTC. If there are actually 1 million BTC (0r 100k or whatever)missing, lost or otherwise irretrievable, then the price per bitcoin is notionally higher.
Of course, there's no way to ever prove some coins were lost or not so the point is moot.
In a roundabout way I agree with you, just not for the same reasons.
In effect the lost coins are already priced in, I just find the idea of lost BTC fascinating.
Laptop drives just aren't as useful as desktop drives (most towers can take 3-5 3.5" drives, most laptops can take exactly 1x 2.5"), and this particular platter was probably only 64-256GB?
Yeah, you could do that. But not everyone needs an external (I've got one I haven't powered up in at least two years) and considering externals are rarely backed up (heck often they ARE the backup) I don't know that I'd be jumping to have a played-out system drive as my external.
Because for the price of the case you can get a flash drive with similar capacity than a 5 year old laptop drive, and much nicer, smaller and more portable?
I can get a good USB2 enclosure for $10-15. My 6.5 year old laptop hard drive is 120GB (and couldn't read/write data via SATA much faster than it can via USB2 anyway).
A 128GB flash drive costs around 5 times as much as that enclosure. Yes, it's better, but it's quite more expensive. A more comparably priced 32GB flash drive stores several times less data (which might matter to you) and may have write speed that can't even saturate USB2 (ditto; I installed Fedora on a 16GB flash drive that has max 3MB/s write speed and it takes amusingly long to install updates, though its read speed is decent and doesn't suffer seek time).
Flash drives will get cheaper, but the meaning of "5 years ago" will change just as quickly (given current trends).
That's what I did with my IDE drives. Just a cheap housing off newegg but the speed is lackluster and having my current computers recognize the device was spotty at best. Probably just the nature of a cheap device but even if it preformed adequately I have trouble deciding what to use it for when I have a plethora of SD cards laying about.
Probably scrap it for the magnets at some point. Those are much better than the fridge magnets you find at the store!
Data recover guys need old drives. I always wondered why anyone would want my toshiba 5gb drive--some guy on craigslist drove to my house in the middle of the night.
A client of his business fried his harddrive, with all
the company account on it. He needed my drive for parts.
A not-unreasonable penalty for risking pollution of his ground water, especially since he probably did the same thing to electronics many times before. I can't believe nobody is talking about this. Illegal in many US states.
1. I believe penalties for polluting our externalities should be greater, yes. As evidence I cite the fact that people keep polluting with existing penalties/enforcement. The tragedy of the commons is a very real thing.
2. I wasn't recommending that be the legal penalty. But if karma decides to be a bitch to this guy, hey I ain't complainin'.
3. I was exaggerating for effect. Seemed for a good cause: We human beings are total bastards towards the environment.
Penalties work best when they are large enough to hurt, but without causing irreversible harm. There's lots of research on what humans find pleasant and unpleasant (Thinking: Fast and Slow, etc.), which is often unrelated to any actual damage. This seems like an example of one such idea that I'll call unrealized opportunity cost. Seeing what might have been won't matter in the long run, but perhaps it'll rise up in people's psyche enough to alter their behavior.
> I believe penalties for polluting our externalities [sic] should be greater, yes. As evidence I cite the fact that people keep polluting with existing penalties/enforcement.
This is a neat example of contemporary use of the externalities concept in political discourse. First, although the word appears in your statement like a totem, you're not using it correctly. Second, your second sentence doesn't support your first, unless you assume that the harm from polluting the environment is infinite. If we priced pollution perfectly for everyone, people would keep polluting because society would rather have some pollution and some products than no pollution and no products. Raising the cost of polluting will lower the amount of pollution, but there is no reason to expect that it will lower the amount of pollution to zero, and the position "keep raising the cost until the activity disappears" is grounded in religion, not economics. It requires you to assume that the harm of the taboo activity is so great that no amount could ever be desirable.
You go along, separate your stuff into several different piles. Pay fees for things like fridges, CRTs, etc. Then you leave.
The thing is... I don't actually believe that electrical equipment is really recycled. Stuff like monitors may have the most toxic bits removed, but I strongly suspect that all other electrical equipment is just put into landfill as-is.
Which means the guy has done all that he could to get it recycled, and that it's the authorities and government services themselves who are just dumping stuff in landfill even when it was delivered as recycling.
All that said... if it was recycled as advertised, then the chances of it still existing would be closer to zero than the current scenario.
The thing is... I don't actually believe that electrical equipment is really recycled
I had something similar happen when I went to my local recycling center a year after moving into a new town. I had carefully squirreled away a pile of batteries (AA, AAA, D-cells, etc), old smoke detectors (which contain trace amounts of radioactive elements), and some unused cans of latex paint. Saved it all for the big trip to the recycling center.
The guy told me that they'd accept it all, but next time I might as well toss everything but the paint into the trash, as that's what they were going to do with it. Pretty disappointing.
Smoke detectors should be properly disposed of but alkaline batteries can be thrown away. Long ago ordinary batteries used to contain some amount of hazardous heavy metals but that's no longer the case.
I don't have anything to add to the conversation except for the fact that your comment made me literally laugh out loud at its absurdity and naivete. Thanks, I needed that.
Give me a break. Who doesn't throw hard drives into the trash? And are you really so sure hard drives are included in any of the state e-waste laws? I doubt very many if any.
He is not the only one, back in 2010 I did mine 160 BTC, however at some point I stopped caring. Months later I had to format hard disk because ArchLinux did a great job breaking the whole system with an update, in the moment I just didn't remember that there were a BitCoin wallet in my system. Damn ArchLinux.
Although I didn't lose much as him. Now I kinda feel relieved knowing his mistake, he lost much more than me, I am sure that there are much others at the same spot. We all just contributed to elevate the bitcoin price by making misery out of our selves.
Yes. The "total pool of bitcoins" is actually less than 21m, considering the lost ones. Does it matter, though? Whether the max is 21m or 20.1321029 ...
Potentially. There's a chance that someone could recreate the same keys for the lost wallets, but the odds are not in their favor (gross understatement). If this happened they'd be able to create transactions moving the bitcoins in the formerly lost wallets to their own wallet(s). However, until someone gets so lucky these bitcoins are locked out of the economy.
No. They are still there, accounted to that address in the blockchain. In the rare event that someone discovers the private key used to derive that address: happy days. In the near term, practically speaking, you can negate them from circulation. It's a very low probability that it'll be spent.
Break wallets encrypted with a passphrase, or crack private keys? The former is possible for weak passphrases, but if the latter is ever possible that's a Very Bad Thing for Bitcoin.
It may happen eventually, but hopefully we will have migrated to stronger crypto by then. I do wonder what will happen to abandoned coins at that point. Will they become invalid after a migration period, or will they be up for grabs to the fastest cracker?
I meant to crack private keys, it will eventually become viable to spend resources researching/developing an attack vector to break those abandoned wallets. Migration to better cryptos will certainly happen, but remember that the lost wallets won't be upgraded, because they're, well, lost.
Making them invalid would be self-defeating to bitcoin, but it's not bitcoin's fault that some day abandoned wallets will become breakable, there will never be an everlasting bullet-proof encryption, and my point is: It won't happen tomorrow, it may take tens or hundreds of years, but it will certainly happen.
Agreed, though I'm not sure Bitcoin's users/miners wouldn't "vote" to eventually invalidate unmigrated wallets. There's a tradeoff between accidentally destroying someone's legitimate wealth (e.x. a nLockTime'd transaction left as an inheritance) vs allowing crackers to eventually claim potentially enormous abandoned wallets (worth billions, if not trillions of dollars in the future). But remember those unmigrated wallets would also be equally vulnerable to cracking as abandoned wallets.
Perhaps there could be a solution whereby a nLockTime'd transactions could be presented during the migration period. I haven't thought through the details.
Either way, treasure hunting in the future will almost certainly be of the digital variety.
A lazy install and a bad Arch Linux update (actually, a misinterpretation of some error messages on my part) reminded me why it was stupid to have /home on the same partition as everything else. Multipartition setups are trivial and will save your data (in my case I lost nothing but some toy OpenCL programs as it was my gaming rig, and most important stuff was kept on a shared partition).
Come one, Arch is maybe one of the easiest distros to break but certainly one of the easiest to fix using chroot from USB live image.
Forums are very helpful, and also if some current update is possibly breaking there is a deep post on the homepage discussing how not to break the system and how to recover from a broken state.
Pardon my ignorance, but how do you prove a) He doesn't have a copy of the private key? b) He's telling the truth about mining them? c) Actually threw away the drive?
Collecting the donations changes everything. It seems like going to "the internet" with a sob story and a paypal account (or bitcoin wallet in this case) has been getting pretty popular recently, or at least has been getting more attention.
I absolutely cannot understand why anybody would ever throw money at some unverified sob story...
I do; and I do it because I'm not completely cynical about the general public. I actually think most people are telling the truth. I could be very wrong, but nothing in my life has indicated as such. I have no idea what that indication would look like, but my default is to believe people unless I have a reason not to.
I'm not completely cynical about the general public. I firmly believe that most people are good trustworthy people who are kept in line by their own sense of what is right and wrong, not the law. However I am aware that there is a small fraction of the general public that makes a living scamming the largely innocent and trusting general public.
If I hear about somebody's house burning down on the local news, I might chip in a few dollars so that they can get their kids new clothes or whatever. I hear the same story, on reddit, 4chan, HN, whatever, from the alleged victim, and they are coming to me with this story and a collection jar? I'm sorry, I am going to require at least some local news confirmation, and it seems like even that isn't good enough with some of these scams.
And don't even get me started on how in most of these cases the jump from "here is my sob story" to "and that is why I need money" is completely missing. The connection there is clear when a house burns down, but "I threw something out, then later learned it was worth a lot"? "I am a server who was insulted/was not tipped"? Uhuh. If I see a donation cup, and no connection between "sob story"->"now I need lots of money", I don't think that there is any rational conclusion besides "it's a scam".
It's essentially the same as throwing out holiday or birthday cards with a cash gift inside (if it's a check it could be recoverable by contacting the sender). Shit happens and people forget about things.
Assuming there's not too much iron and steel in the land fill, it's might be possible he could find it with a sensitive enough magnetometer at 1 meter, maybe more so if you built a motor to move it around rapidly. I think the field strength at 1 meter might be something like 1 milliGauss, which should definitely be detectable. Walking the field and recording the magnetic fields might be possible, you'd at least know the range you needed. Secondly, any recent dated arial photos could maybe be used to determine a better approximation of depth, i.e. looking for a marker in the actual photo, then going to dig to find that marker, record the depth.
There's a fair chance the drive is unreadable. Exposed to the elements, and when trash is put in a landfill it's not just dumped, it's mixed with earth and pushed around with bulldozers. I would not be surprised if it has been crushed.
Its probably all right. I worked in landfills and dug up old trash in expanding a site. Unopened glass soda bottles from 30 years ago, books in great condition, metal lunch boxes in great shape. The lack of moisture means it just sits there. It depends on how deep it was buried when it came off the truck and it survived the first pass at burying.
"Does anyone have a power adapter for this notebook? the battery is dead...."
Talk to these guys, they're highly regarded in r/bitcoin and you can do it without compromising access to the coins: http://www.walletrecoveryservices.com/
There are some people who believe a realistic value for bitcoin in the success scenario could be circa 1 million dollars (if it were to partially supplant gold or USD).
As a thought experiment, if I google for landfill prices, I see prices like 40 million dollars for a landfill. So if you can mine one hard drive in that scenario, landfills should be massively more valuable.
People throw away money all the time. I used to do landfill design. Summers were spent on sites doing inspections. My former boss tells the story someone came looking for trash from a specific location. They ask, did anyone see metal box? They went to look for it and couldn't find it. Asked what was in the box, the response was "Money, a lot of money..."
If you throw something away by mistake your only chance is to get to the landfill before the truck does and hope they'll dump in a separate area you can pick through.
The original owner has less of a legal claim to the harddrive than the landfill owner, so if the landfill owner were to find it why would he return it for 1/4th the value?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 94.0 ms ] threadLook forward to treasure hunters attacking the site though.
Bitcoin disks may be the future of buried treasure.
They say the drive could be "3 or 4 feet deep" - let's just call that one metre. So it's only 7140 cubic metres to search.
Admittedly, that's 7140 cubic metres of foul trash. It will include soiled babies diapers, rotting food, female sanitary products, tins, bottles, etc etc.
Assuming you could find the drive at a cost of one million. (roughly £140 per cubic metre) That'd give you 6 million to share between you and the council.
I guess you could add some environmental fixing thing in there (removing any electronics that are found, recycling any glass or metals vent methane, etc, and give them £2m, and keep the rest?
This sounds like it would be an incredibly unwise and risky investment, even if you pretend that you will definitely find the hdd.
Edit: I'd guess the odds of the data still being intact are close to zero. A drive is so fragile I doubt it survived. Consider it being thrown around in a garbage truck and then slowly buried under several feet of other trash. Several inches of trash at a time, over time, with trucks rolling over the area each time. Then, consider the weather and other garbage juices drenching the device.
It's a goner...
At beast it's a speculative attack to be considered in a risk assessment, not a real attack anyone ever actually uses.
I'd welcome any information about people really using electron microscopes to get better than 63% per bit recovery.
"Howells stopped mining after a week because his girlfriend complained that the laptop was getting too noisy and hot while it ran the programs to solve the complex mathematical problems needed to create new Bitcoins."
He should definitely have found another way...
21 million / 0.00000001 = how many bitcoins can "exist".
So considering that there's no real blocking factors in how many bitcoins can be distributed, why does it matter if some get lost?
The value of the coins are hardly affected now that such a high level of adoption has occurred. Those coins weren't even in previous circulation in any marketplaces affecting prices.
By an ever decreasing significancy as the market cap expands and BTC of value are held onto with care.
To your first part, why would 1 BTC lost when it's worth $1000 have a greater significance than 1 BTC lost when it's worth $1,000,000?
EDIT: Unless you mean any individual wallet's share of BTC is likely to be less, in which case the odds of losing as much BTC in a single incident is significantly reduced.
Exactly. The only common narrative of these lost BTC is an earlier ignorance by the owner and a rapid increase in price. That is the only reason "millions" get lost. Once prices stabilizes via increased market cap and average BTC/owner is reduced, this narrative stops being prevalent and large scale.
With hyper-deflation, spending $1,000,000 in the morning would be a losing proposition because by nightfall you might buy the same good for $1,000.
Both suffer severe problems, economically, but who loses and who wins changes. The matrix is something like this:
Ultimately, neither one is good. In the case of moderate deflation and inflation it's similar. There is less motivation to invest, greater motivation to save under moderate deflation. Moderate inflation increases the motivation to invest, but decreases the motivation to save.Of course, there's no way to ever prove some coins were lost or not so the point is moot.
In a roundabout way I agree with you, just not for the same reasons.
In effect the lost coins are already priced in, I just find the idea of lost BTC fascinating.
seriously though, every bitcoin owner can thank him for reducing the available supply.
A 128GB flash drive costs around 5 times as much as that enclosure. Yes, it's better, but it's quite more expensive. A more comparably priced 32GB flash drive stores several times less data (which might matter to you) and may have write speed that can't even saturate USB2 (ditto; I installed Fedora on a 16GB flash drive that has max 3MB/s write speed and it takes amusingly long to install updates, though its read speed is decent and doesn't suffer seek time).
Flash drives will get cheaper, but the meaning of "5 years ago" will change just as quickly (given current trends).
I have the USB 3.0 and thunderbolt adapters for the USM cases. Manufacturers should really switch to this format.
Probably scrap it for the magnets at some point. Those are much better than the fridge magnets you find at the store!
Even if the HD was ok, they won't even bother opening it up.
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...
However, it looks like the UK implementation of the WEEE[1] is fairly narrow in scope.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electronic...
boggle
You weren't on the Apple-Samsung or Newegg juries, were you?
2. I wasn't recommending that be the legal penalty. But if karma decides to be a bitch to this guy, hey I ain't complainin'.
3. I was exaggerating for effect. Seemed for a good cause: We human beings are total bastards towards the environment.
This is a neat example of contemporary use of the externalities concept in political discourse. First, although the word appears in your statement like a totem, you're not using it correctly. Second, your second sentence doesn't support your first, unless you assume that the harm from polluting the environment is infinite. If we priced pollution perfectly for everyone, people would keep polluting because society would rather have some pollution and some products than no pollution and no products. Raising the cost of polluting will lower the amount of pollution, but there is no reason to expect that it will lower the amount of pollution to zero, and the position "keep raising the cost until the activity disappears" is grounded in religion, not economics. It requires you to assume that the harm of the taboo activity is so great that no amount could ever be desirable.
Which was sourced entirely from "someone in the IRC channel".
Whether it's true or not is one thing, but if it is then the reddit source also says:
> He went to the "recycling centre" and they showed him around.
This makes some sense, I've 'recycled' before at places like this: http://www.hounslow.gov.uk/spacewaye
You go along, separate your stuff into several different piles. Pay fees for things like fridges, CRTs, etc. Then you leave.
The thing is... I don't actually believe that electrical equipment is really recycled. Stuff like monitors may have the most toxic bits removed, but I strongly suspect that all other electrical equipment is just put into landfill as-is.
If the story is all true then the facility in question is this one: http://www.newport.gov.uk/_dc/index.cfm?fuseaction=wasterecy...
Which is advertised as a recycling centre.
Which means the guy has done all that he could to get it recycled, and that it's the authorities and government services themselves who are just dumping stuff in landfill even when it was delivered as recycling.
All that said... if it was recycled as advertised, then the chances of it still existing would be closer to zero than the current scenario.
The guy told me that they'd accept it all, but next time I might as well toss everything but the paint into the trash, as that's what they were going to do with it. Pretty disappointing.
Although I didn't lose much as him. Now I kinda feel relieved knowing his mistake, he lost much more than me, I am sure that there are much others at the same spot. We all just contributed to elevate the bitcoin price by making misery out of our selves.
It may happen eventually, but hopefully we will have migrated to stronger crypto by then. I do wonder what will happen to abandoned coins at that point. Will they become invalid after a migration period, or will they be up for grabs to the fastest cracker?
Making them invalid would be self-defeating to bitcoin, but it's not bitcoin's fault that some day abandoned wallets will become breakable, there will never be an everlasting bullet-proof encryption, and my point is: It won't happen tomorrow, it may take tens or hundreds of years, but it will certainly happen.
Perhaps there could be a solution whereby a nLockTime'd transactions could be presented during the migration period. I haven't thought through the details.
Either way, treasure hunting in the future will almost certainly be of the digital variety.
CPU based bitcoin mining, probably solo without a pool, 7000+ coins. Ha. Those were the days.
Many of us wrote it off.
I dug up a year old hard drive to get back 0.05 BTC the other day :-)
So this guy made up more than 1/7 of the entire bitcoin network?
There were less than 6 people besides him that had as powerful of computers?
I absolutely cannot understand why anybody would ever throw money at some unverified sob story...
I do; and I do it because I'm not completely cynical about the general public. I actually think most people are telling the truth. I could be very wrong, but nothing in my life has indicated as such. I have no idea what that indication would look like, but my default is to believe people unless I have a reason not to.
If I hear about somebody's house burning down on the local news, I might chip in a few dollars so that they can get their kids new clothes or whatever. I hear the same story, on reddit, 4chan, HN, whatever, from the alleged victim, and they are coming to me with this story and a collection jar? I'm sorry, I am going to require at least some local news confirmation, and it seems like even that isn't good enough with some of these scams.
And don't even get me started on how in most of these cases the jump from "here is my sob story" to "and that is why I need money" is completely missing. The connection there is clear when a house burns down, but "I threw something out, then later learned it was worth a lot"? "I am a server who was insulted/was not tipped"? Uhuh. If I see a donation cup, and no connection between "sob story"->"now I need lots of money", I don't think that there is any rational conclusion besides "it's a scam".
I could imagine the headline: "Retired computer tech regrets telling everyone of the Bitcoin treasure trove".
Talk about bad financial decisions.
But who knows?
"Does anyone have a power adapter for this notebook? the battery is dead...."
Been meaning to figure out how to script something to run through variations on the type of password I would have used.
As a thought experiment, if I google for landfill prices, I see prices like 40 million dollars for a landfill. So if you can mine one hard drive in that scenario, landfills should be massively more valuable.
If you throw something away by mistake your only chance is to get to the landfill before the truck does and hope they'll dump in a separate area you can pick through.
If he can crack the encryption then why not just crack the largest wallets instead.