Man Throws Away Hard Drive Containing $7.5M In Bitcoins

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We've all done some pretty dumb stuff before but this takes the cake. :eek:

A hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site. A digital 'wallet' containing 7,500 Bitcoins that James Howells generated on his laptop is buried under four feet of rubbish.
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He generated 7,500 bitcoins on a laptop? Really?

(did not read the article)
 
What not to do when you clean up that damn desktop!
Oh well expect alot of garbage pickers...:D
 
MasonD said:
He generated 7,500 bitcoins on a laptop? Really?

(did not read the article)
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Must have been real easy at that time to mine them. He did it on a laptop within only a weeks time. Sucks to throw that kind of money away, lol.
 
i had 1 bitcoin mined in the past, i opened my wallet file up and it was empty. Kind of weird so most likely his bitcoin wont even work
 
Every time I read about Bitcoins, it makes me wish I had mined them when I first heard about them.
 
Borgschulze said:
Every time I read about Bitcoins, it makes me wish I had mined them when I first heard about them.
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or bought some when they were cheap....even at $100 earlier in the year would have been nice considering it is hovering in and around the 1k mark.
 
I mined a bitcoin back in the day, but lost track of it ... oops
 
The reason they've become so valuable is because 99% of them apparently get lost.
 
I'd be tracking some trash down. That's a he'll of a lot of money to just up and lose.
 
Eh, in the end all he's really lost is the electricity it took to mine them. And did I read it right; he mined for a week and got 7500 coins? Even at the start, was that possible on a lowly laptop?
 
teh_chem said:
Eh, in the end all he's really lost is the electricity it took to mine them. And did I read it right; he mined for a week and got 7500 coins? Even at the start, was that possible on a lowly laptop?
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I'd imagine at the beginning there were very few people who actually took part in mining so there was more to go around. Not sure about making that much in a week on a laptop though.
 
teh_chem said:
Eh, in the end all he's really lost is the electricity it took to mine them. And did I read it right; he mined for a week and got 7500 coins? Even at the start, was that possible on a lowly laptop?
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Ya, at the start bitcoins were only worth fractions of a penny. The network scales difficulty so that ~7200BTC per day is produced regardless of network power. It's possible if he started mining very early on.
 
Borgschulze said:
Every time I read about Bitcoins, it makes me wish I had mined them when I first heard about them.
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And this is why they hold no real value. People only want them to have them, because they wished they had got them earlier.
 
The OP is also why really old hard drives continue to fetch decent cash on eBay. Buyers hope to get data off of the drives, not specifically bitcoin but whatever else the previous owner may have left on there.
 
Well who ever owns that garbage dump site can now jack the price of the property up 5 million , sell it and retire.
 
$%*@ I hate hearing about bitcoins. I tried to buy a few thousand of them back in 09 just for kicks but I didn't trust the site with my card info and decided it was to much work to go 10 minuets to the store and get a prepaid card.

Please stop posting new stories about how much they are worth.
 
I think I had 10+ bitcoins mined when a hd took a dump and lost them. Wasn't a big deal back then since they were only worth 10 bucks or so? Kinda hurts now... :p
 
Dam it, had no idea they were worth $1000. Should have gotten them when they were $200 :(
 
I wonder what this man will do next fellas? Hitting the bottle first or the drugs. Either way homey is gonna be one depressed cat for a while...
 
Soggy said:
$%*@ I hate hearing about bitcoins. I tried to buy a few thousand of them back in 09 just for kicks but I didn't trust the site with my card info and decided it was to much work to go 10 minuets to the store and get a prepaid card.

Please stop posting new stories about how much they are worth.
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That's how I felt at first, but then I realized I would have unloaded all of them when they hit $20 or $50 or $100. Nobody, save for the folks that forgot they had them, would have held onto them for this long.
 
McFry said:
And this is why they hold no real value. People only want them to have them, because they wished they had got them earlier.
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I get paid in USD and my online orders are in USD, but my primary currency is Peso so i already am doing exchanges between different currencies regularly. It already really hurts with the USD fluctuating by a few cents. Imagine if the USD was fluctuating as much as bitcoins. For some they would see their money getting multiplied by a thousand, but for most, they would find that their savings had dwindled to nothing.

Life is full of regrets, if he hadn't lost or forgotten about it, he would very likely still not have it now and spent it on something else. Maybe a few burgers or a couple of video cards.
 
According to the article, worth $500k when he mined them. So he decided it wasn't worth taking care of a $500k hard drive (worth $7M when he threw it away "cleaning")? I call 100% complete and utter bullshit. But hey it's a bitcoin article so it will get clicks eh?
 
at the dumps around here, your supposed to not throw electronics out with the regular trash, so if he'd properly disposed of it, he may have had a better chance for recovery :D
 
haste. said:
According to the article, worth $500k when he mined them. So he decided it wasn't worth taking care of a $500k hard drive (worth $7M when he threw it away "cleaning")? I call 100% complete and utter bullshit. But hey it's a bitcoin article so it will get clicks eh?
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I agree; if i had $7mil in a digital asset i would back it up to a water proof thumbdrive and implanted in my arse.

7 mil is 7 mil; ya I may lose 7 bucks in paper monry to the washer once and a while, but 7 mil, ya you keep track of it.
 
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