Man Wants to Search for $127M of Bitcoin He Threw Away — but the Gov’t Won’t Let Him
(ANTIMEDIA) — The exponential rise in the value of bitcoin over the last seven years is one of the big stories of the decade. At its peak last week, it was up over 500% since July of this year. But its overall surge is even more stratospheric. One hundred dollars worth of bitcoin mined or bought at the beginning of this decade would be worth tens or even hundreds of millions today. Needless to say, many people are kicking themselves for not having invested early. And for those unfortunate souls who had bitcoin and lost it, there may be no end to the anguish.
One of these people is James Howells, an IT worker living in the United Kingdom who lost 7,500 bitcoins that he mined on his personal laptop in 2009. Adding more salt to the wound, James (who is in his early thirties) knows where the Bitcoin is — buried in a landfill in Newport, South Wales.
As he explains to the Telegraph, James was one of the first bitcoin miners and stored the fruit of his algorithmic labors on the hard drive of a Dell laptop, which he accidentally threw away. “After I had stopped mining, the laptop I had used was broken into parts and sold on eBay,” James recounts.
Now James wants to go looking for the hard drive — which contains around $127 million worth of bitcoin — underneath four years’ worth of garbage.
“A modern landfill is a complex engineering project and digging one up brings up all sorts of environmental issues, such as dangerous gases and potential landfill fires,” he admits. “It’s a big, expensive and risky project.”
And it may not even be possible, as the city council does not seem willing to undertake the endeavor despite Howells’ offer to cover the expenses of the specialty equipment that would be needed. A spokesman for the Newport City Council says that such a project could cause harm to the surrounding environment and is unlikely to find the hard drive, much less in working condition.
“It is likely that the hardware would have suffered significant galvanic corrosion due to the presence of landfill leachates and gases.”
Nevertheless, Howells isn’t giving up hope and has offered to give city council members a percentage of the recovered bitcoin, the value of which could continue rising in the coming years. Tech mogul John McAfee recently doubled down on his original bullish prediction, saying he believes bitcoin will hit $1 million by 2020. If that valuation transpires, Howells’ landfill bitcoin would be worth billions. Maybe that would be enough to convince the city council to grab a shovel.
In the meantime, James Howells continues to invest in other cryptocurrencies and real estate. One has to imagine, though, that from to time he daydreams about digging through 350,000 tons of garbage.
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