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…
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.