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- James Howells of Newport, Wales, offered his city council a 25% discount on his 7,500 bitcoin if it allows him to search the landfill he dumped it in in 2013.
- Howells bitcoin is now worth around $ 275 million, with bitcoin trading around $ 37,000 at the time of writing.
- However, Newport City Council told CNN in a statement it was not authorized to excavate the site, warning of a “huge environmental impact on the surrounding area,” “without any guarantee of discovery. [the hard drive] or it is still in working order. “
- Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.
In 2013, British IT worker James Howells accidentally threw away a hard drive with a digital wallet containing 7,500 little-known and virtually worthless Bitcoin.
Fast forward, and at the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at around $ 37,000, and its store is said to be worth around $ 275 million.
Now the Newport, Wales local has offered their town council a huge sum of money if it allowed them to search a landfill site where they believe the hard drive has been disposed of.
Howells told CNN: “I have offered to donate 25% or 52.5 million pounds sterling ($ 71.7 million) to the town of Newport for distribution to all local residents who live in Newport if I find and collect the Bitcoins.
“It would cost around £ 175 ($ 239) per person for the whole town (316,000 people). Unfortunately, they turned down the offer and won’t even have a face to face discussion with me about it.”
Scenes from the landfill in Newport, Wales, where Howells’ hard drive is located.
BBC News
Howells had mined Bitcoin for four years, when cryptocurrencies were still in their infancy and were worth very little. Howells threw away the hard drive between June and August 2013, believing he had already backed up the files he needed.
He first realized his mistake, he told BBC News, when the price of Bitcoin jumped from $ 150 to $ 1,000 and his wallet was worth around $ 6 million in 2013.
After visiting the landfill, Howells told the BBC he believed he had “no chance” of recovering his hard drive. However, he now has a new plan to find him.
Howells told CNN on Friday: “The plan would be to dig a specific area of the landfill based on a network referral system and recover the hard drive while meeting all safety and environmental standards.
“The reader would then be presented to data recovery specialists who can rebuild the reader from scratch with new parts and attempt to recover the tiny chunk of data I need to access the Bitcoins.”
“The hard drive is worth over £ 200million (approx. $ 273million), and I’m happy to share some of it with the people of Newport if I had a chance to look it up. 50% would be for the investors who put in place the capital to finance the project, and I would end up with the remaining 25%, ”he added.
However, in a statement to CNN, a spokeswoman for Newport City Council said she was not authorized to search the site.
She said: “The council has told Mr. Howells on several occasions that excavation is not possible under our license permit and that the excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area.
“The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into the millions of pounds – with no guarantee of finding it or still being in working order.”
Howells is, at least, not alone in his misfortune: The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Bitcoins in lost wallets made up around 20% of the 18.5 million Bitcoin in existence, for a total of $ 140 billion.
Wallet Recovery Services, a company that helps recover lost digital keys, told The Times it receives 70 requests a day from users trying to access their digital wallets – a number three times the number there are. a month.
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