Howell tried to retrieve the hard drive in the local landfill, but the law prohibited him from doing so.
Unfortunately, he never recovered his mined coins.
This story is well known to me and many others, but what people don’t understand is the fact that that person made two critical mistakes that led to the complete loss of BTC. The first mistake is that he actually kept 2 HDDs in the same drawer, and that he actually threw the wrong drive - which is a very stupid move considering that the HDD doesn't take up so much space that it should have ended up in the trash. Another mistake is that he went public with this information, and although some information says that he was allowed to look for the disk, but when some others started digging in the same garbage, the owner simply could not allow it to continue and take responsibility for something happens to someone.
According to Chainalysis, an analysis firm specializing in all things related to blockchain, about 17% to 23% of all Bitcoins have
already become unrecoverable. An estimate of 2.78 million to 3.79 million BTC is forever lost to humanity. This amounts to around
300 inaccessible wallets containing anywhere between 1,000 to 10,000 Bitcoins.
Such analyzes are mostly based on the fact that a certain coin did not move from a certain address for a certain time, and I think that this company took into account the time of 4 years. That's a pretty bad method to determine how much of something is lost, especially in the case of BTC.
Since Bitcoin has a maximum supply of 21 million, having lost Bitcoins means that there will be fewer coins in circulation once
the maximum number has been mined. People predict all Bitcoins will be completely mined by 2041 or even earlier.
People do not have to predict anything in this case, according to the protocol established in advance the last BTC should be mined in the year 2140 - so you only made a mistake in about 100 years. But in ten years, 99% of all BTC will be mined and that 1% will not mean too much for the next hundred years.
Take the extra step of securing your coins to avoid the frustration of losing your Bitcoins. Hardware wallets are the go-to
when it comes to storing your funds. For an extra layer of security, keep an offline copy of your private key,
but make sure you’re the only one who has access to it.
Hardware wallets yes, but they by themselves don’t mean much if the person using them isn’t familiar with how these devices work. Every day people complain that they have lost coins and have used hardware wallets - but when they admit that they kept their seed online or put it on a site that promised to double their funds, we realize that a lot of people actually have no idea what they are doing.