It’s hard to know exactly how much Bitcoin is locked forever in wallets whose owners forgot the password, or in hard drives thrown out. There’s plenty of anecdotes of desperate people trying to recover their lost Bitcoin. Chainalysis, a firm that tracks cryptocurrencies to help companies and law enforcement, estimated in 2018 that up to 23% of all Bitcoin is lost forever—around 3.79 million bitcoins or the equivalent of around $170 billion at today’s conversion rate.

Naturally, some of the people who own those lost Bitcoin are willing to do anything to get them back. And there’s a market for companies or individuals who promise to recover the lost Bitcoin for a fee.

Motherboard talks to some of the people trying to get back their crypto, and the people who are making that happen, in the newest episode of CRYPTOLAND on YouTube.

To critics, turning natural gas into bitcoins is emblematic of everything wrong with the growing industry. To Giga Energy co-founders Brent Whitehead and Matt Lohstroh, though, they’re undertaking an environmental service—generating virtual currency using harmful gas that would otherwise be sent into the atmosphere. Instead of combusting surplus natural gas from an oil rig, they’re diverting it into a generator, which converts it into electricity to power computers that mine for bitcoin.

There's been a lot of skepticism around crypto's impact on the environment as well.

Alex De Vries, a data scientist at the Netherlands’ central bank and founder of Bitcoin energy tracking project Digiconomist who spoke with Motherboard reporter Audrey Carleton as well as Hines and CRYPTOLAND host Krishna Andavolu, says Bitcoin’s reliance on the fossil fuel sector is making vast and irreversible contributions to climate change, however.

“Most people are putting their money in Bitcoin simply because they expect the value of Bitcoin to go up,” he said. “If that’s the situation, where there is just not much possible practical use, but there is a very large energy impact, then my verdict would be that’s absolutely not worth it.”

The full story of the 2014 hack against Twitch has never been reported before, and is based on interviews with seven former Twitch employees who were working there when the breach happened, and when the company later investigated the hack and dealt with its fallout. Motherboard granted sources anonymity because they are bound by non-disclosure agreements that forbid them from discussing details of their work at the time.

The discovery of the suspicious logs kicked off an intense investigation that pulled nearly all Twitch employees on deck. One former employee said they worked 20 hours a day for two months, another said he worked "three weeks straight." Other employees said they worked long hours for weeks on end; some who lived far from the office slept in hotel rooms booked by the company.At the time, Twitch had few, if any, dedicated cybersecurity engineers, so developers and engineers from other teams were pulled into the effort, working together in meeting rooms with glass windows covered, frantically trying to figure out just how bad the hack was, according to five former Twitch employees who were at the company at the time.

The hack was so bad that Twitch essentially had to rebuild much of its code infrastructure because the company eventually decided to assume most of its servers were compromised. They figured it would be easier to just label them "dirty," and slowly migrate them to new servers, according to three former employees who saw and worked with these servers.

The meeting document spells out the process in a much blunter way than Amazon's cutesy marketing suggests.

"[Astro] slowly and intelligently patrols the home when unfamiliar person are around, moving from scan point to scan point (the best location and pose in any given space to look around) looking and listening for unusual activity," one of the files reads. "Vesta moves to a predetermined scan point and pose to scan any given room, looking past and over obstacles in its way. Vesta completes one complete patrol when it completes scanning all the scan point on the floorplan."

Developers who worked on Astro say the versions of the robot they worked on did not work well.

"Astro is terrible and will almost certainly throw itself down a flight of stairs if presented the opportunity. The person detection is unreliable at best, making the in-home security proposition laughable," a source who worked on the project said.

"They're also pushing it as an accessibility device but with the masts breaking and the possibility that at any given moment it'll commit suicide on a flight of stairs, it's, at best, absurdist nonsense and marketing and, at worst, potentially dangerous for anyone who'd actually rely on it for accessibility purposes," the source said.

“I cracked the glass on my phone and I’m comparing costs. How much for just that part?” One man acting the part of the customer asks in one of the videos.

“I can show you the cost for just the part before we begin,” another man, playing the part of repair technician says.

“Whoa,” the customer says, holding out his hands. “That’s way more than the shop down the street. Why is it so expensive here?”

“This quote’s for a genuine Apple part,” the technician says.

“What do you mean by genuine?” the customer asks, his hands making scare quotes. “I’d like to save some money. Aren’t they really the same part?”

After this, the technician launches into an explanation of why it’s best for people to replace broken iPhone parts with genuine Apple products. “A genuine Apple part has to pass AppleCare engineering criteria,” the technician says, explaining that a screen from Apple will be tested as if it had just come off the factory floor. “With a genuine Apple display, all the features you’ve come to rely on behave seamlessly...that’s not the case with third party displays.”

Six of the eight videos are dedicated to training repair techs on how to deal with customers worried about the huge costs of repairing an Apple device. One three-minute video is dedicated to helping customers understand why a genuine Apple screen is often better than one from a third party.

In February, Amazon announced that it would install cameras made by the AI-tech startup Netradyne in its Amazon-branded delivery vans as an “innovation” to “keep drivers safe.” As of this month, Amazon had fitted more than half of its delivery fleet nationwide with this technology, an Amazon spokesperson told Motherboard.

Motherboard spoke to six Amazon delivery drivers in California, Texas, Kansas, Alabama, and Oklahoma, and the owner of an Amazon delivery company in Washington who said that rather than encourage safe driving, Netradyne cameras regularly punish drivers for so-called "events" that are beyond their control or don't constitute unsafe driving. The cameras will punish them for looking at a side mirror or fiddling with the radio, stopping ahead of a stop sign at a blind intersection, or getting cut off by another car in dense traffic, they said.

Andrey Shumeyko, also known as YRH04E and JVHResearch online, decided to share his story because he felt that Apple took advantage of him and should have compensated him for providing the company this information.

Shumeyko said he established a relationship with Apple's anti-leak team—officially called Global Security—after he alerted them of a potential phishing campaign against some Apple Store employees in 2017. Then, in mid-2020, he tried to help Apple investigate [the iOs 14 leak] memory, and became a "mole," as he put it.

The letter was sent by Fangda Partners, Apple's law firm in China, on June 18, 2021. In the letter, Apple asked the seller to stop acquiring, advertising, and selling leaked Apple devices, and requested a list of anyone who provided them with the leaked devices. In other words, Apple wants the reseller to say who gave them the devices. Finally, the company requested the seller to sign a document promising to comply with the request within 14 days of receiving the letter.

"You have disclosed without authorization a large amount of information related to Apple's unreleased and rumored products, which has constituted a deliberate infringement of Apple's trade secrets," the letter read.

"The cafe menu items and pricing are out of control! Weighing the food to get more money, the scales are not properly adjusted, ripping us off. They stopped serving fried eggs at the OPS1 breakfast bar because it's faster and cheaper to get them. Now if you go to the grill the price is inflated. What's the difference between the grilled chicken at the grill and the grilled chick at the chicken shack?"

A person who used to work in the intelligence community told that they could confirm that the NSA cafeteria is “depressingly bad.” “Maybe not the worst cafeteria I’ve ever eaten in but worse than the time I ate at US run military base mess hall,” they said, asking to remain anonymous.

Most of all, the records compiled by Motherboard show that the capability to unlock iPhones is a fluid issue, with an ebb and flow of law enforcement sometimes being able to access devices and others not. The data solidifies that some law enforcement officials do have trouble accessing data stored on iPhones. But ultimately, our findings lead experts to circle back to the fundamental policy question: should law enforcement have guaranteed access to iPhones, with the trade-offs in iPhone security that come with that?

At some point before the launch of FLY Anywhere, according to Peloton's lawyers, Flywheel launched "Project Magnum," an attempt to "obtain 'as MUCH secret intel on Peloton as we can,'" according to an improperly redacted document Peloton filed in court.

"Project Magnum was not some extemporaneous side-project [...] but rather a concerted, widespread effort," one of Peloton's filings adds.