The probability of hitting the jackpot is higher than finding an HDD with bitcoins in a landfill – scientists have estimated the chances of a would-be miner

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.

Image source: AI generation Grok 3/3DNews

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.

admin

Share
Published by
admin

Recent Posts

Study: Apple C1 mobile modem falls short of Qualcomm modems in terms of connection quality in difficult conditions

A study by Cellular Insights Inc. found that Qualcomm's mobile modems perform better than Apple's…

8 hours ago

Tesla Warns Trump Administration of Chip Tariffs

Tesla has called on the Trump administration to exercise caution in imposing tariffs on imported…

8 hours ago

To better compete with OpenAI, Meta will split its AI team into two

Meta✴ will split its AI teams to better compete with OpenAI and Google, as well…

8 hours ago

The Order: 1886 Director Co-Founds New Studio — Atlantis Studio Aims to Conquer the Industry with Innovative Games

Ru Weerasuriya, co-founder of Ready at Dawn, which closed last summer, and creative director of…

8 hours ago

Review of the wireless speaker “Yandex Station Street”: Alice in the cities

To be honest, when I first saw the news about the release of the portable…

8 hours ago

Blacktail developers announce Davy x Jones — a shooter about the headless pirate Davy Jones in the afterlife of sailors

Polish studio Parasight, known for the folklore action game Blacktail about the young Baba Yaga,…

1 day ago