Unfortunately, the hard drive has been disposed of: Welshman wants to search for Bitcoins in a garbage dump

Unfortunately discarded hard drive
Welshman wants to search for bitcoins in a dump

James Howells could be a very wealthy man with Bitcoins worth millions. The catch: the hard drive ended up in the trash a few years ago. Now he wants to mine for the cryptocurrency there.

When James Howells accidentally threw a hard drive in the trash a few years ago, the annoyance was probably limited. But that has now changed. Because there are 7,500 Bitcoins on it, as reported by the US news channel CNN. The current value: almost 220 million euros. So Howell offers the local government the equivalent of around 55 million euros to look for his hard drive in the landfill.

The IT professional lives in Newport, Wales. The hard drive ended up in the trash in the summer of 2013. Howells had produced the bitcoins by "mining" four years earlier, when the cryptocurrency was hardly worth anything and largely unknown. When the Bitcoin rate went through the roof later, the Welshman looked in vain for the hard drive and came to the conclusion that he had disposed of it. In view of the renewed course rally, he turned to the community with a request. He wanted to finance the search through the participation of investors, in return he promised half of the potential profit.

But the administration refused the request. A spokeswoman told CNN that Howells had called in multiple times over the past few years. He could not, however, be given permission to dig for the hard drive – if only for environmental reasons. Also, the cost of removing and storing the waste could run into the millions with no guarantee of finding the drive. And even if it should appear again, it is questionable whether it is still functional.

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