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Land Registry data for January 2023

I've uploaded the latest Land Registry data for England and Wales to the site. Prices continue to bounce back from the end of the Stamp Duty holiday slump, although rising interest rates may impact that.

ONS postcode data February 2023

I've uploaded the latest postcode data from the ONS. The data looks sensible but let me know if you spot anything amiss

ESRI Shape data

I've added ESRI Shape data for several of the KML/GeoJSON downloads. Let me know where else you would find them useful

Land Registry data for December 2022

I've uploaded the latest data from the Land Registry to the website. Prices are on the way up again but the number of sales are still low

Land Registry data for November 2022

The latest house price data from the Land Registry is on the site. Remarkably, prices are back in positive territory, although the number of sales is still weak.

What happens to your Bitcoin when you die?

When someone dies, to access their bank account, the executor goes to the bank, shows them the relevant documentation and gets access to the account. Bitcoin works differently because there is no central authority. The owner of the Bitcoins is responsible for the security of their wallet. There are two identifiers associated with a wallet, the public part which anyone can have access to and lets you send and receive bitcoins. It also means anyone can see the transactions in and out of that wallet. Then there is a private key, that only the owner of the wallet should have access to. If anyone else gets access to it, they can steal your Bitcoins.

Which is where things get tricky. When you're alive, you want to keep the private key as secret as possible, so you may decide not to share it with anyone and store it somewhere only you know about. But if you get hit by the proverbial bus tomorrow, those bitcoins are essentially gone if your family have no idea how to access them. 

Let me illustrate with a story. My brother Andy was an early adopter of Bitcoin. In March 2013, he invested a small amount for a few Bitcoins. Then in December 2014, he moved them to another wallet, printed out the details to access that wallet and gave the hard copy to my other brother Simon for safe keeping. All good so far. In June 2014, he moved some Bitcoins back to the original wallet. I'm not sure what he did with those Bitcoins but the original wallet seems to be what he was using for everyday transactions. I'm not sure how much of them he spent, but he mostly seemed to purchase other cryptocurrencies with them.

Jump forward to November 2020. We are in the middle of a pandemic, lots of people locked in their houses have started dabbling in cryptocurrencies, the Bitcoin price has started to take off and Andy moves his remaining Bitcoins to another wallet. I'm not sure why he moved them but in December he moved them again into another wallet. This time it's a bit clearer why. About $17,000 in cryptocurrencies were stolen from his Guarda account, so I think he was spooked by that and moved the Bitcoins in case that wallet had been compromised*.

On to November 2021 and Andy's collection of Bitcoins is now worth about 1,000 times what he originally paid for them. By any reckoning, that is a phenomenal investment. But Andy continues to hold them (or hodl them as the true believers say). 

Onto June 2022. At the start of the month, Bitcoin suffers a big fall in its price and Andy gets a letter from HMRC suggesting he may owe them some tax. Andy had been out of the country for most of the last ten years, but there were some years he would be considered a UK resident. We'll never know which of these, if any, were the cause but on 19th June Andy killed himself. 

After we dealt with the immediate stuff that needed handling (thanks to the British Embassy in Belgrade), we had to sort out Andy's estate. We had the hard copy for what we thought was his Bitcoin holding but when I opened up the wallet, I found it was empty. I could follow the transactions to where the Bitcoins ended up but had no means to access them**. We had his laptop and I was able to get into that***. I looked around there but couldn't find anything. We were able to access some of his email accounts (he had several) since we could reset his password but we weren't able to get into ProtonMail since no recovery option had been set up. 

His Gmail account included a cryptic email sent in January 2021 titled 'KP2' that contained something that looked like a private key. But it wasn't...

Eventually I got lucky and discovered a text file of passwords in his GMail account. Except they weren't full passwords, parts of them were replaced with asterisks and underscores and it was several years old. But now I knew how he stored his passwords, I'd previously been looking for some kind of password manager on his laptop. 

After staring at those partial passwords I realised that they were all kind of similar, a word followed by a number and ending with the service name. And some of those asterisked words looked familiar, they were all places he'd visited. I tried this theory out with a few of the passwords and was able to access a few accounts. I still couldn't access ProtonMail, which was the one I was keen to look at because that seemed to be the email account he was using for important stuff and there was no way to get into it other than knowing the correct password.

I went back to the laptop. This time I found what I was looking for almost immediately. It was the password file, but this was a much more recent version. There were two email passwords suffixed with (PKP1) and two email passwords suffixed with (PKP2). I guessed that meant he'd emailed the private key to himself in two separate emails. Fortunately the latest password file meant I was able to access ProtonMail and find the other part of the private key there. Doubly fortunate because the other email account he had sent it to no longer existed (CTemplar). I tried the two parts together and I had access to his wallet.

But the point is I got lucky. And I'm an IT professional so have some clue what I'm doing. It could have been very different. We could have quite easily ended up in a situation knowing there was a big chunk of money in a wallet that we'd never be able to access. Andy made an incredible investment that he never benefitted from and it could have meant that no-one benefitted from it, because he didn't tell anyone how to access it. Personally I think cryptocurrencies are a complete scam, but if you think they are the future and own them, make sure the people who will inherit them know how to access them.

* This seems to be a recurring problem on cryptocurrency exchanges, people seem to regularly lose their money due to security breaches or the exchange going bust.

** I do find it odd that wallets are anonymous but the transactions between them are visible to anyone.

*** It's not particularly difficult to hack into a Linux machine, just Google it

GB station usage data 2021-2022

I've uploaded the latest station usage data for 2021-2022. Traveller numbers have partially recovered from the pandemic, but are still some way from their pre-pandemic levels. Probably not surprising since the data is from April 2021 to March 2022 when life had certainly not returned to normal

Land Registry data for October 2022

The server is slowly churning through the latest house price data from the Land Registry. It looks like the number of sales are still falling but prices are starting to head up. Also interesting to note that it is flats that caused most of the downward movement in prices over the last year, houses continued to increase in value

UK postcodes November 2022

I've uploaded the latest postcode date from the ONS to the site. As ever, let me know if you spot anything amiss

Land Registry data for September 2022

I'm in the process of uploading the latest house price data to the website. It looks like house prices are on the way up again, although they are still negative on an annual basis. I would guess that increasing interest rates and the cost of living crisis will likely cause prices to fall in the coming months.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned about increasing mortgage rates is how the effect of them is very different depending on where you are in your mortgage life. For example, compare the increasing payments for someone with a 25 year mortgage compared to someone with 5 years remaining on their £100,000 mortgage

Number of years	Mortgage rate		Percentage increase in payment
	2%	6%
25	£424	£644	52%
5	£1,753	£1,933	10%

The person with 5 years left on their mortgage is mostly paying down the loan whilst the person with 25 years left is mostly paying interest so their payments increase much more. Once again the younger generation are getting walloped, this time by maths rather than their government.

GeoJSON data

I've added GeoJSON versions of some of the KML downloads on the website. If they prove popular, I'll add more as time goes on. Let me know if there is anything you'd particularly like to see.

Land Registry data August 2022

I'm uploading the latest Land Registry data to my website. Sale prices continue to fall but more slowly. And right on cue, the government have reduced Stamp Duty in a bid to get prices moving up again. Unfortunately their other budget changes managed to spook the markets meaning mortgage rates are heading up, so it's quite likely they'll be getting less revenue from Stamp Duty whilst also failing to get an election boost.

Filter segments by Local Legend

A long time ago, one of the users of my Strava Segment Explorer asked for the ability to filter segments by whether they had a Local Legend. Well, now you can! Most segments still don't have the data required so it may not be currently that useful, but over time it should become more helpful. From my own experimentation, it seems the segments that don't have a Local Legend set are ones nobody has ridden recently or that are flagged as hazardous

Downloadable segment lists

I've just added a new feature to the site. When using the segment explorer, you can download a CSV file of the segments you're viewing. The CSV file will include all the segments I know about in the area, which could be more than what is displayed on the map. 

I've limited the maximum area for which the site will return data, mostly to protect my server from malicious or daft users.

The columns returned are currently just what's displayed in the table. If you need other data, let me know. Also let me know if you have any suggestions or find any problems

Land Registry data July 2022

I'm in the process of uploading the latest house sales data for July 2022 to my website. According to the Land Registry, prices are falling on an annual basis but this article caught my eye which claims prices are going up by 10% per year. The Nationwide base their calculations of a different set of data and they probably calculate the numbers differently to me so it's unlikely they would agree completely, but it's still interesting that the direction of travel is completely different. Still, they think the average price of a house is £273,751, my calculations from the Land Registry put it at £266,796, which is in the same ballpark. Maybe they did some funky calculations to remove the effect of the Stamp Duty holiday from last year?

Latest UK postcode data

I've updated my website with the latest postcode data from the ONS. It seems to look sensible but let me know if you spot any problems

GB station usage for 2020-2021

I've updated the GB station usage data for 2020-2021. As you may expect, the usage of stations collapsed during this period of time, something to do with a pandemic, you may remember it.

The data came out last November, but I completely forgot about it. I've now added a reminder for this year and subsequent years.

Land Registry data for June 2022

I'm uploading the latest property data from the Land Registry to my website. Whilst the price of everything else is going through the roof, the price of houses have started going down for the first time in about ten years. The main reason for this is something I hadn't noticed before. Just before the Stamp Duty holiday ended, sales volumes and prices went ballistic. Those figures have now dropped out of the annual price calculations leading to a big drop in prices. The architect of this classic boom and bust could well be our next PM.

Land Registry data for May 2022

I've uploaded the latest property sales data to my website. House price inflation seems to be bouncing around close to zero, which I guess is why the government is talking about 50 year mortgages...