I was in the "he needs to let it go" camp for the last 10 years. You know what? I'm changing sides. I choose to live in the timeline where garbage bitcoin man buys the dump and proves everyone wrong. He earned it
Nah. I'm in the "everyone involved in crypto needs repeatedly swift kicks in the nads" camp but spending the rest of your life digging in a garbage dump looking for gold is also acceptable.
I'm happy i never got involved with bitcoin. I remember being mildly interested but decided to not bother. If i had a drive with almost billion on it and i had lost it or just not able to access it, it would dig at me too even if i tried to just let it go.
I messed around with bitcoin in like 2011. It seemed valueless because there were very few USD markets for it. Anyway I used to play a game where every action was a gambling mechanic in full bitcoin. Want to kick a coconut tree? It costs 1 BTC and 0-4 will drop. I had 100s of BTC at one point.
Anyway the computer had issues and then the hard drive was taken by a family member. I don't get too upset thinking about them because I would have just spent them once they had real value.
I have a friend in NYC who searches his entire apartment every year or two because he had a few BTC on an old thumb drive. It is a bummer that he lost it.
I got some dogecoin at a one cent and sold it in the twenties, which was a nice little gain, but nothing huge like being an early BTC holder.
Honestly though, if he can preemptively put sufficient funds into escrow dedicated to managing all aspects of the site and engineering plans for digging with minimal perturbation of each waste cell, then let him have it*.