In January 2025, the UK Supreme Court banned a would-be miner from searching a city dump for a hard drive containing a bitcoin wallet that he had accidentally thrown away. But even if he had received permission or had become the full owner of the dump, the chances of finding a 2.5-inch drive there are very small, scientists have calculated. The time and expense of searching may simply not pay off, and finding a hard drive quickly is like constantly hitting the jackpot. It doesn’t happen.
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The current value of bitcoins on a discarded hard drive is $700 million, a jackpot that is hard to pass up. Welsh engineer James Howells started mining bitcoins in 2008 and managed to mine over 7,500 coins. While fixing a laptop that had been spilled on him by lemonade, he mixed up the hard drives, and the drive containing his bitcoin wallet ended up in the trash, and then in the city dump. Since then, the man has been looking for ways to access the trash for excavation, but has been denied in all cases, including the latest court ruling.
Scientists have decided to find out what the chances are of finding a 10-centimeter hard drive in a landfill that already holds 1.4 billion kilograms of solid waste. It can be calculated and follows the laws of statistics. The area of the entire landfill is approximately 500,000 m² or 5 billion cm², if we start from the size of a small storage device with a volume of about 70 cm². According to the most conservative estimates, with a depth of 20 m of garbage layers, the total volume to search will be 10 million m³ (10 trillion cm³). This is approximately 3,600 times the volume of the swimming pool in which the Olympic Games were held in Paris last summer.
Given the expected volume of trash, calculations suggest the chance of finding a small object there is about 1 in 143 billion. That’s 3,000 times less likely than winning the UK National Lottery jackpot. However, with $700 million at stake, hotheads may turn a blind eye. Then there’s the question of the time and money it would take to find it.
With time, everything is simple. If it takes 1 second to view 1000 cm³ of garbage, then checking the entire volume by one person will require 10 billion seconds, or 316 years of continuous searching. Obviously, a citizen is unlikely to have such a period, so it will be necessary to involve a team and equipment, and this is already a serious expense.
Rough calculations show that the chance of finding a hard drive in the first year of searching can be estimated as 1 in 316. This already seems more realistic, but not free. Then statistics come into play, according to which the profit from finding a hard drive during the first year can be $2.4 million. If the search costs are lower than this amount, the enterprise will remain in the black, and if higher, the search will be absolutely unprofitable.
So, mathematics works against our hero, but this has never stopped real heroes from doing what they think is right.