In a tale that seems stranger than fiction, a man's 12-year quest to recover a lost fortune in Bitcoin has come to an abrupt end. James Howells, a British IT worker, has been forced to abandon his search for a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoins, worth an astonishing $800 million…
It is worth the try. That is a generational wealth.
It’s also a futile attempt. In the off chance they even find it, that hard drive would be toast by then. In a landfill, that hard drive would prob be shattered and in pieces, not to mention probably corroded and unreadable.
It’s quite amazing how much data can be recovered from hard drives that have been even in fires. I think they recovered like 95% of the data from the hard drives on the challenger shuttle that blew up.
I feel like this is an argument of Expected Value.
Ex. if the harddrive has $X on it, and there’s a Y% chance of finding it over the course of a lifetime, then the expected value of the search is X*Y). But if Y is so low that it would take 10 lifetimes to have a better than 50% chance (we’ll say a 6.5% chance if you searched your whole life), it doesn’t matter if X is $742 million (so that the Expected Value is about $50 million) or $742 billion, it’s still objectively a waste of a life.