This Man Is Still Trying to Find His Lost Bitcoin Physical Wallet with 7.5 Thousand BTC on It
CryptoBit News Today2 min read
A computer hard drive worth $75 million sits under roughly 200,000 tonnes of trash at a landfill site in Newport, South Wales. James Howells, an IT worker, discarded the drive taken from a broken Dell laptop while clearing his desk during mid-summer. He had salvaged the drive after lemonade was spilled on his Dell laptop in 2010, intending to auction off the computer's remaining components on eBay. He did not have a backup of the data.
A Misplaced Hard Drive and Millions in Bitcoin
The hard drive contained roughly 7,500 Bitcoins, which Howells had mined in 2009. Mining the 7,500 Bitcoins in 2009, when it was worth almost nothing, would have only required about a week and his laptop. When Bitcoin first emerged, just a month before Howells began mining, aspiring Bitcoin miners had to solve highly complex mathematical problems to generate new Bitcoins, then virtually unknown cryptocurrency. Back in 2009, the digital currency remained virtually unknown to people outside technical communities. Howells ceased mining after one week because his girlfriend objected to the heat and noise generated by the laptop.
Unbeknownst to him, the digital currency ballooned in value in the years following. The 7,500 coins eventually reached a value of $7.5 million when Bitcoin surpassed $1,000, though Howells only realized on a Friday that he had thrown the wallet away.
But no one is allowed to look without council permission. Although Howells secured funding from two European backers and approached Newport Council repeatedly, the local authority denied him permission to dig for the drive. A spokesperson for Newport Council warned that treasure seekers would be turned away, adding, "obviously, if it was easily retrieved, we'd return it."
Howells, however, hasn't given up. His next step is to try to convince Newport Council to allow a dig in the landfill. Howells projects that the entire retrieval project, which would feature an AI scanner made by Max AI, will cost $11 million. If the hard drive is found and the opportunity to restore the crypto proves successful, he promises to give a 25% stake in his find to the people of Newport.
