It’s a nightmare situation that, in the age of digital currency, may become more regular. In 2013, a guy in Newport Wales, United Kingdom, threw out an old PC hard drive while doing a brief spring cleaning of his home. Fast forward almost a decade, and he’s still pleading with his local landfill to let him go through it.
The man, 35-year-old IT engineer James Howells, wants to rummage through his local trash since the hard drive he tossed out contained a wallet containing 7,500 Bitcoin.
That quantity of Bitcoin would have been worth 665 thousand dollars at the moment he tossed out the hard drive (500 thousand pounds).
It would have made him a millionaire today, as it is valued at $357 million.
Howells described his search for the waste, which is about the size of a football field, in an interview with The Guardian in 2013. “I described the scenario to one of the guys down there. He also drove me out to the landfill site, where they’re now working on a ditch. He stated something from three or four months ago would be three or four feet below, and it’s about the size of a football field “According to Howells,
Howells seems resigned to losing his digital money following initial scavenging efforts for the misplaced hard drive.
He has, however, recently enlisted the support of locals in Newport in his search for the device. Anyone who can help him find it, he claims, will be given millions — assuming the hard disc is still readable. The 35-year-old also volunteered to give 25% of any future finds — around $70 million — to a “Covid Relief Fund” in his hometown. Unfortunately, it’s possible that the missing hard disc will never be located. According to a CNBC report from earlier this year, Howells’ request to rummage through the trash with a group of volunteers was recently denied by the Newport City Council due to environmental worries about the impact of unearthing so much garbage.
Howells isn’t the only cryptocurrency owner who has experienced a similar setback. The New York Times estimated earlier this year that around $140 billion in Bitcoin had been “lost” due to owners forgetting their passwords from the cryptocurrency’s early days or never backing up their wallets. A father-son duo of “ethical hackers” just launched Crypto Asset Recovery, which uses an interview process and an algorithm to help people in that situation recall their passwords. If only they had a search algorithm for almost a decade’s worth of garbage.
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