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A Briton who accidentally threw a Bitcoin hard drive in the trash has offered the local authority more than $ 70 million if it allowed them to dig a landfill.
Computer scientist James Howells emptied the reader, which held a digital stock of 7,500 bitcoins, between June and August 2013. He mined the virtual currency four years ago when it was of little value, according to CNN. It is “Al Arabiya.net”.
But when the value of the cryptocurrency skyrocketed and went looking for it, he found that he had mistakenly thrown the hard drive in the trash.
Now that the lost Bitcoin was still rising, Howells contacted Newport City Council in Wales to seek permission to search a specific section of the landfill where he believed the hard drive had ended up there.
In return, he offered to pay the council a quarter of the present value of what was in the storage unit, which he said could be distributed to the local population.
Digital currency was created in 2009 by an unknown computer programmer or group of programmers known as Satoshi Nakamoto.
The price of Bitcoin has reached an all-time high in recent days and is now trading around $ 37,000.
Howells first discovered that the hard drive was missing when his Bitcoin was valued at around $ 9 million, based on current prices it is estimated to be around $ 273 million.
He told CNN: “I offered to donate 25% or $ 71.7 million to Newport to distribute to everyone in Newport in case any Bitcoins were found and recovered. That would amount to around 175. £ ($ 239).) Per person citywide (316,000 people). Unfortunately, they declined the offer and will not discuss it with me at all. “
research plan
Although the dump is huge, Howells is hopeful. “The plan will be to dig a specific area of the landfill based on a network reference system and restore the hard drive while meeting all safety and environmental standards,” he said.
“The drive will then be introduced to data recovery professionals who can rebuild the drive from scratch with new partitions and try to recover a small portion of the data I need to access Bitcoin.”
$ 200 million for the city and investors
“The hard drive is worth approximately $ 273 million, and I’m happy to share some of it with the residents of Newport if I had the opportunity to look it up,” Howells said. “About 50% will go to investors from the capital offering to finance the project, 25% for the city and the rest. Me 25%.”
A spokeswoman for Newport City Council told CNN that the local government authority “has been approached several times since 2013 about the possibility of recovering a piece of computer hardware that allegedly contains bitcoins.”
The spokeswoman added in a statement that the council had not rejected the offer and was not authorized to search the site.
She pointed out that the board had informed Howells on several occasions that exploration was not possible under our license and that the exploration itself would have a significant environmental impact on the surrounding area. In addition, “the cost of digging a landfill, storing and treating waste can run into the millions of pounds, with no guarantee that it will be found or that it will still work.”
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