For more than a decade, a computer expert from Newport in south Wales has doggedly fought to recover £500m of bitcoin he says was accidentally thrown into a council tip.
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Howells, 39, says that in the summer of 2013 he accidentally put the hard drive containing his bitcoin wallet in a black bag during an office sort-out and left it in the hall of his house. His then partner is said to have mistaken the bag for rubbish and took it with her on a trip to the dump, where it has been lost ever since.
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Howells previously said he had been able to pinpoint the location of his hard drive to within “cell 2 – area 2” of the Docksway site in Newport, after he hired the council’s former head of landfill to help his cause.
The recovery effort has become a geek cause celebre, and Howell’s ‘team’ of people, some of whom are looking for a cut of any eventual pie and other just for a fun challenge, now includes someone who worked on the Space Shuttle Columbia black box, Boston Robotics, various AI people, and some vulture capitalists Richard Hammond from Top Gear (the short guy who crashes everything, not the towering pillar of gout that is Jeremy Clarkson) made a documentary about it.
I have spent much of the last twenty years doing landfill-related work, including construction and operations oversight.
I hate to break it to Mr. Howells, but if UK landfills are anything like US landfills, and assuming that the waste didn’t go first to a recycling processor, here’s what your poor forlorn hard drive would need to survive before it can yield up its bitcoiny treasure:
1) being thrown in the back of a packer truck (i.e. ‘garbage truck’) with a bunch of other refuse, and squashed by a hydraulic compactor, because trash doesn’t weigh all that much and to be efficient with trash collection that means compacting it so you can keep putting more on the truck.
2) driven or rail-freighted to a landfill and dumped in a big pile which is spread out into a layer a couple of feet thick by the very un-gentle touch of a bulldozer or a front-end loader with sheepsfoot wheels, which also drive repeatedly over everything to compact the waste into as dense a layer as possible for both structural reasons (even compacted trash is squishy) and for space reasons. Even in the most DGAFabout-the-environment-parts of the US/EU/Japan/Canada/etc., landfill space is always at a premium and the more you can squeeze in, the more money you make because your money comes from waste tipping fees.
3) Get pretty soaking wet. Trash is always wet.
4) at the end of each working day, a layer of soil or other cover material is placed on top of the day’s refuse fill and compacted again. Ditto any subsequent layers of refuse and cover material that are placed later. What I’m getting at here is that a lot of pressure is going to get put on the poor little hard drive, repeatedly.
5 The waste is then braised in a lovely stew of organic (acetic, butyric) and mineral acids (sulfuric, hydrochloric) with lots of salts, in a largely anaerobic environment at about 120F as the gradual decay of organic materials breaks down proteins, cellulose, lipds, etc. and other organic compounds into volatile fatty acids, acetates and alcohols for, in this case, eleven years. If you ever see a piece of metal that’s been dug out of a proper landfill, unless it’s something like a large and heavy piece of cast iron, it’s going to be crushed flat and corroded to little more than big flakes of rust, like it spent twenty years on the bottom of the ocean.
Sorry dude, like pretty much everything else in a modern landfill, your Bitcoin wallet is now in many small, flat, broken, wet and corroded pieces.*
Then there’s the basic problem of finding the thing. Even with the help of knowing what parts of the landfill were in use at the time Howell accidentally threw the thing out, that’s still 15,000 tons of material (or by volume roughly equivalent to a cube possibly 400 feet on a side), ALL OF WHICH would need to be excavated, painstakingly screened for one small, inconspicuous object, and returned to its location of origin, and not just put back any old way but in a careful and controlled manner. That would involve a LOT of time, and a LOT of money.
Neal Stephenson basically part-invented and definitely popularized the concept of Bitcoin with his late 1990s book Cryptonomicon, but even he who has a knack for seeing things before they happen didn’t bother to write about this kind of situation. Possibly because he likely thought that anyone who had millions of dollars ‘worth’ of something on a hard drive wouldn’t be careless enough to just throw things out.
*This also explains why landfill mining is unlikely ever to really pan out, since the effort would so greatly outweigh the benefit, and why the greatest priority should be put on diverting anything recyclable before it gets to a landfill.
