A resident of Newport who threw away his hard drive containing Bitcoin, which he believes is now worth 210 million pounds and wants the local council to help him search for it at the landfill site. James Howells now claims that he threw away a hard disk in 2013 that had 7,500 Bitcoins – a virtual currency.
Howells further added that he is willing to donate 25 percent of the total currency to the Newport council, South Wales if they found the hard drive. However, the council stated that under its laws, the excavation was not possible. On the other hand, the man said that if he were to recover the virtual currency, he would prefer to put it in the pandemic relief fund for the residents of the area.
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While talking to the BBC, Howells said, “Imagine how great it would be to say, ‘I’ve given everyone in the city a few hundred pounds’.” In 2009, he bought the Bitcoins for almost nothing, but when he spilled a drink on his laptop, the hard drive eventually ended up in a drawer. However, he kept the disk in his office drawer and forgot about the Bitcoins altogether.
Back in 2013, when he threw away the hard disk, it was worth 4.6 million pounds ($7.5 million). But now as the value of Bitcoin has surged more than fifty times. Currently, the price of a single virtual currency is over a staggering 28,000 pounds.
Besides, Howells claimed that searching for the IT device would not be as hard as many might think. He added that he knows the exact date when he dumped the drive. Interestingly, Howells said that a few investors had been willing to cover the excavation cost for a big chunk of the virtual currency.
Several months after he realized that the drive was missing, he contacted the council, but they refused. The Newport council stated that “The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds – without any guarantee of either finding it or it still being in working order.”
