Unrequited Bitcoin.
We’ve all done things we regret.
Eaten one too many pieces of chocolate cake, watched a man drown instead of throwing the lifebuoy we were holding, spent a little too much on a pair of shoes we just had to have.
But if you want to know what regret is, you need to ask Campbell Simpson or James Howells. In the bog of regret, they’re up to their necks. They are the gold standard of things that could have been.
As far as I know, they’ve never met. But both of them share one thing in common. Bitcoin. Unrequited bitcoin.
Mr. Simpson is a writer on the tech site Gizmodo, and you can read his version of events by clicking here. In 2010, he spent $25 on some bitcoin and ended up with 1400 Bitcoin. He kept the coins (we call them coins, but they don’t physically exist. They are just very long chains of numbers and letters that a computer interprets) on a hard drive, not as he would later regret in an online vault or exchange (An online bank of sorts).
He used this hard drive for all sorts of things, storing documents, photos, films, and TV shows he’d downloaded and almost twenty-eight million dollars on it.
Unfortunately for Campbell, but lucky for this article. About a year later, he threw away the hard drive during a clean out.
I threw out the wrong newspaper this week. So I sympathise with him because I wasn’t able to check the answers to Tuesday’s crossword when they were published on Wednesday. In many ways, we share the same burden.
When he realised he’d thrown away the bitcoins, they were worth four thousand dollars, and he was a little bit annoyed. Then they kept climbing, and how he can live with himself is beyond me.
But he has come to terms with it, at least publicly. Saying what’s gone is gone. I suspect he drinks a lot.
But Campbell Simpson isn’t alone.
Artificial Intelligence, robot dogs and a massive robotic arm. Not only the plot of a sci-fi horror film, but also how James Howell, a computer engineer from Newport, Wales, intends to locate his bitcoin.
James Howells threw out a hard drive in 2013. He owned two identical drives. One was empty the other had one hundred fifty-five million dollars on it. Guess which one he tossed.
Using the arm and the dogs, the AI system will sift through the dump. Learning from what we’ve discarded, that the human race cannot be reformed before turning the dogs on us and doing the only thing that AI thinks we are fit for.
Before the self-inflicted downfall of the human race at the hands of our soon to be robot masters, James has a plan to find that hard drive. The hard drive is a little bit bigger than a deck of cards, about the size of an iPhone 6. I’ve lost my phone on my desk, in my pockets, and once it spent a week undiscovered in my car (Yes, I tried calling it).
The dump is several acres in size and contains one hundred and ten thousand tons of garbage. Meaning that James is nothing if not mad. Madly determined, I meant madly determined.
James plan involves hiring a team of experts in industrial dredging (No, I don’t know either), waste management, and even one of the team that recovered the black box data from the 2003 Challenger shuttle disaster. Like I said, he’s madly determined.
Of course, there is always a spanner in the works and in this case. It’s the owner of the dump. The New Port City Council, who won’t allow James to dig up the dump, as it would be detrimental to the environment.
I get the feeling it wouldn’t have taken James a week to find his phone in his car.
James’ plight was reported in EL Pais. In an article by Miquel Echarri, you can read the original article Here
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