THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: $749 million ‘treasure hunt:’ Crypto miner fights to retrieve Bitcoin fortune he claims was accidentally thrown in landfill.
An early Bitcoin miner says he lost a fortune worth more than $700 million after his partner accidentally threw a hard drive containing 8,000 coins in a landfill dumpster more than a decade ago.
James Howells of Newport, Wales, has asked his local council if he can dig through its rubbish site to find the discarded hard drive—but he has been denied so far.
Howells is now taking Newport City Council to court, saying it either needs to give him access to his property or settle the damages for the value of the drive.
Howells, 39, says he mined the coins himself in 2009—drawn to the world of cryptocurrencies in the wake of the financial crisis a year prior.
The Bitcoin were stored on a private key within Howells’s computer hard drive, which was placed in a drawer while Howells—a systems engineer by trade—updated his PC.
In 2013, Howells said he placed that hard drive in a plastic bag, which his former partner then erroneously took straight to the dump, depositing it in a large waste bin.
With the price of Bitcoin sitting at an all-time high of $93,637 at the time of writing, the buried drive would potentially be worth more than $749 million.
And you thought switching from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 was a challenge.