At present, online payment has become the main payment method for daily transactions. To better respond to this development trend, the country introduced the concept of digital currency a few years ago. When it comes to digital currency, the first thing many people think of is Bitcoin. Although Bitcoin cannot be used in daily transactions, it has become a wealth, and recently, Bitcoin has ushered in another surge. It is reported that Bitcoin has even reached 60,000 US dollars, which makes these people holding Bitcoins very happy. However, there is a programmer in the UK. Faced with the skyrocketing Bitcoin, he couldn’t be happy, and even more and more sad, because he accidentally threw his 7,500 Bitcoins into the trash.
A British programmer lost 1.7 billion bitcoins! The programmer’s name is James Howells. In 2009, he bought relevant computer equipment and started his mining career following the trend of the Internet at that time. After four or five years of persistence, Howells has dug a total of 7,500 bitcoins, but the more he digs at the time, the more he has no bottom, because the price of bitcoin hardly fluctuates at the time, and one is about $100, which is not enough. The cost of running his computer. In this case, in 2013, Howells sold all his mining equipment, but he still kept the 7,500 bitcoins, all stored in a hard drive.
Although he kept the 7,500 coins, they were accidentally thrown into the trash can during the general cleaning and then sent to the landfill. Buried under the ground. Howells also felt a little pain after finding out. After all, it was worth $750,000, but he still didn’t care much. But what is unexpected is that when his Bitcoin was accidentally thrown into the trash can, Bitcoin officially ushered in “spring”, and it only stopped until around 2017. At this time, the price of Bitcoin has come to US$20,809 per piece. In this way, he was equivalent to throwing 150 million dollars away, and Howells could no longer sit still.
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Faced with a large amount of wealth, Howells first asked the government to allow him to dig up the landfill to find the hard drive that he accidentally abandoned. This unreasonable request was naturally rejected by the local government. Locally, it is illegal to dig a landfill, because, in the process, a large number of pollutants such as harmful gases will be produced, which will cause great damage to the environment. But Howells was still reluctant to give up, so he thought of a way.
He found a few people to invest to jointly hold these 7,500 bitcoins, and finally raised 7.5 million US dollars. Howells later told the local government that the money would be donated to the government in exchange for the opportunity to dig out rubbish, but it was rejected. This idea is difficult to work in reality, because about 5 tons of garbage are generated and buried every day, and it has been several years since Howells discarded the hard drive.
In fact, according to a report in June 2020, before the deadline of the investigation, they found that nearly 3.7 million bitcoins had not been changed for at least 5 years. They predict that 3 million bitcoins may disappear forever. But not all of them are thrown into the trash can, and some are lost for reasons like forgotten passwords, so can these disappeared bitcoins be recovered? If you are willing to pay a lot of money, you still have a chance. For the moment, there are mainly the following ways to retrieve these lost bitcoins.
One is to seek the help of hackers and let them use their superb technology to help them find it. Many times, in the text file records, there will be personal identification numbers left by these people mining, which will allow hackers to repair the server and retrieve their account numbers and passwords. But the cost of asking hackers for help is indeed extremely high, generally between $500 and $2500. Of course, there is also a certain risk. After all, Bitcoin fluctuates and fluctuates, and it may be ruined after being found. However, the chance of getting it back is still relatively high, about 95%.
The second is to use hypnosis to awaken the memory deep in my heart, to find my lost Bitcoin. After all, even when Bitcoin was first acquired, it had spent a lot of time on it, which would have a profound impact on itself. It’s just that I will hide it in my memory later because of time. Therefore, it will be unearthed under hypnosis, but the technical requirements for hypnotists are still very high, and the success rate is about 50%. The third was recovered through violence.
The violence here is not the kind of violent debt collection we understand, but looking for related service companies, using their professional software to predict millions of passwords for themselves, and then experimenting one by one. However, the success rate is very low, only about 30%, and it also costs a lot. Studies have shown that after these bitcoins are finally recovered, and the service company’s fees are deducted, only 20% of the original property can be obtained. Of course, this is when Bitcoin prices are relatively high.
