Whilst doing some Spring cleaning back in 2013 , a man thrust his former PC hard drive into the trash , which quickly unite the mountain of folderol at his local landfill site in Newport , Wales , UK . Little did he know at the meter , that same grueling drive check a wallet fill with 7,500 Bitcoin , deserving a cool £ 500,000 ( $ 665,000 ) in the former crypto day . At the time of him search ? A cool $ 357 million ( now worth around $ 150 million ) .
Once he realise , the human race began a heroic search for the severe drive and has been search ever since . Over the retiring eight years , James Howells has been crawl through mounds of rubbish in the hunt for his $ 350 million needle in a rick – a haystack the size of a football game delivery .
" I had a Christian Bible with one of the guys down there , explained the position . And he actually took me out in his truck to where the landfill land site is , the current ditch they ’re work on . It ’s about the size of it of a football game field , and he said something from three or four months ago would be about three or four feet down , ” said Howells in an audience with theGuardianback in 2013 .
" I ’m at the point where it ’s either gag about it or cry about it . Why are n’t I out there with a excavator now ? I think I ’m just renounce to never being able to witness it . "
After that conversation , Howells all but resigned to the fact his fortune would never be claim . But soon after , he began a search himself and still believes there is hope that the driving is both approachable and decipherable in its probable deteriorated state . In a last - ditch effort , he has now levy residents of his local townspeople to join the hunting , with the hope of millions if the search succeeds .
The odds are surely stacked against him , made worse by the Newport council ’s refusal for any Tennessean to enter the web site . quote the bionomical impairment trawling through buried rubbish would cause , a want of a permission to search the rubbish , and the sheer uncertainty that the knockout drive even lays there , the council will not allow anyone to search the mounds , CNBCreports .
lamentably , if Howells ca n’t find the drive , the Bitcoin is lose forever .
Like most crypto , Bitcoin is untraceable and you could n’t back - up your pocketbook in the early days of excavation . This has lead to inauspicious scenario where people lose the strong-arm drive the crypto is on , like Howells , or leave their password – such as themanwho has just a few guesswork lead before he is locked out of a $ 240 million Bitcoin fortune .
