Half a Billion $$$ in Bitcoin, Lost in the Dump...(highly condensed long read)

Howells downloaded free software that made it possible to acquire bitcoin. He would lend his computer’s processing capabilities to help the Bitcoin system create a permanent record of network transactions, and, in return, the program would let him keep some currency. A private key—a unique chain of sixty-four numbers and letters—granted him exclusive access to his bitcoin stash. He soon set his gaming laptop to spend the overnight hours “mining bitcoin,” as the process came to be called.

The first time he mined, Howells’s computer was one of only five on the network. He told me, “I know this because when you’re in a Bitcoin network it tells you, on the bottom right, ‘You are connected to x amount of nodes,’ or machines.” He mined at night, off and on, for a couple of months. But the mining took a lot of processing power, causing the laptop to overheat. The computer’s whirring fan began to irritate Hafina, and he decided to stop. “It wasn’t worth putting up a fight,” he remembers. The coins had no value at the time, and there was no reason to think that they ever would. “It was just mining for fun,” he said. “It was an experiment.” The electricity required to keep his computer going had cost him about ten pounds.

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By the time Howells ended his mining project, he had accumulated eight thousand coins—and in the fall of 2013, that stash was worth about $1.4 million.

If things had gone just a bit differently, James Howells might today be as rich as the Queen of England.

Howells, an engineer who helped maintain emergency-response systems for various communities in Wales, often worked from home, and that night he decided to neaten up his office. As he recently recalled to me, “The thought process was: I’m going to be drinking every day. I don’t want to be on a hangover and cleaning this mess up when I get back.”

In a cluttered desk drawer, he found two small hard drives. One, he knew, was blank. The other held files from an old Dell gaming laptop, including e-mails, music that he’d downloaded, and duplicates of family photographs. He’d removed the drive a few years earlier after he’d spilled lemonade on the computer’s keyboard. Howells grabbed the unwanted hard drive and threw it into a black garbage bag. Later, when the couple slid into bed. The next day, Hafina got up early and took the garbage to the landfill after all. Howells remembers waking upon her return, at around nine. “Ah, did you take the bag to the tip?” he asked. He told himself, “Oh, fuck—she’s chucked it,” but he was still groggy, and he soon fell back asleep.

Panicked, he checked his desk drawer. In it, he found the empty hard drive—not the one with the bitcoin folder.

The downside to the system’s anonymity is that bitcoin is a tempting target for thieves. Just as Silas Marner tries to ensure that nobody knows where he’s stashed his gold, bitcoin owners spend a lot of time insuring that no one can hack their fortunes. Some prefer to deposit their private keys in offline wallets—storage devices that are kept disconnected from the Internet—where they’re more secure from hackers.

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Bitcoin is also easy to lose. Conventional money comes full of safeguards: paper currency is distinctively colored and has a unique feel; centuries of design have gone into folding wallets and zippered purses. And once your money is deposited in a bank you have a record of what you own. If you lose your statement, the bank will send you another. Forget your online password and you can reset it.

The sixty-four-character private key for your bitcoin looks like any other computer rune and is nearly impossible to memorize. It can also be difficult to remember where you have stored the key.

By the beginning of 2018, Howells had more than a hundred million dollars buried in the Newport dump. He kept pleading his case to city officials. He called his local member of the Welsh Parliament, in Cardiff, and of the British Parliament, in London. He thought of suing Newport, but such moves, commonplace in America, are rare in the United Kingdom. “I’m not a court person,” Howells told me.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/half-a-billion-in-bitcoin-lost-in-the-dump?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_Control_120721&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&utm_term=tny_daily_recirc&bxid=5c65ada024c17c67f8197646&cndid=51716586&hasha=eead39f7620cdca80b1dc39641816435&hashb=fa4cf0df01642f4499afc2ea7a217c319708bf8d&hashc=fcac913fd336d6fa6acec2446f3964bdeb5309d1b0aadf601873a0adb31c82cd&esrc=Keywee_Daily&mbid=CRMNYR012019&fbclid=IwAR39zj_CA__q3prULmsyETmzwDkBqe6I_TXWDPt4YnN410TvtRVpR5K4INE

It was at this point that I concluded this dude was irredeemably dumb. Quite unfortunate.