this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
68 points (95.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43968 readers
1205 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Before bitcoin even slightly took off, i was on a website to buy something and they accepted bitcoin. I had to look up what bitcoin was, and thought fuck it, i'll buy like 15 bitcoin an buy the thing for 5 and have 10 more bitcoin if i ever need more. But it was way more "complicated" that i anticipated, and i was high as fuck, and suddenly though that i might being scammed or something, because like i said, i saw the name bitcoin maybe twice until then. I'm not too sad, because i'm pretty sure even if i bought it, i would've lost it anyway, forgot the password, or never bothered to figure out how to cash out.
Be glad you're not that guy that had hundreds on a hard drive and has to do the analysis on whether trying to dig it up from a landfill would be profitable.
James Howells. Quite a sad story. For those unaware, I'll give you the short version:
In 2013, Howells mined close to 8,000 BTC and saved his private keys (which is like a password to get access to your BTC) to his laptop's hard drive. Months later he absent-mindedly throws it in the trash. Next morning he realizes what he's done and tries going to the local garbage dump to search for it. He grew obsessed with finding the hard drive. It got to the point where his wife left him and took the kids with her. To this day he's still trying to get his local government to give him permission to dig through the city's garbage dump.
Semi-rant
His plan to retrieve his lost crypto was doomed from the start. When the garbage truck came to pick up his garbage, it had its own trash compactor inside, which would have crushed the hard drive to bits, meaning the hard drive most likely died before it even got to the landfill. And even if the HDD wasn't destroyed, the data on it would have likely been corrupted after sitting in garbage for 10+ years. And even if they managed to recover the data, if he tried to sell any of his BTC it would crash the market. He should have just cut his losses from the beginning and spent more time with his wife and kids. Now, this fool's errand to retrieve the (likely-dead) hard drive will be his legacy.It's very easy to say that when you didn't throw something out that would've been worth about half a billion dollars today. I hope he finds peace.