A visibly sad Welshman who inadvertently threw away a hard drive containing $140 million worth of bitcoin is offering the council 10 percent of his stash if they let him dig through actual garbage to find it.
That’s 32-year-old James Howells who got all up in the cryptocurrency back in 2009 when it was worth peanuts. The IT worker was using his computer to mine bitcoin (processing transactions in return for coins) and ended up earning 7,500 of them before his girlfriend cracked the shits and made him stop due to the loud sounds his rig made.
Old mate accidentally threw out the hard drive of that computer which contained the ownership codes for said bitcoin, worth $920,000 at the time. Today, according to its value at the time of writing, that bitcoin is worth a staggering $120,533,418.
The aforementioned hard drive is now sitting somewhere in a landfill in Newport, Wales, where it will very likely stay unless James gets his wish – to dig his way through years worth of heaping garbage.
As you can imagine, he’s refusing to give up on the fortune, pestering the council a bunch of times to let him search for the hard drive, but they’ve declined his request every time. In an attempt to convince them to change their minds, old mate has even offered 10 percent of his fortune, worth around $12 million. He’s also made a number of bizarre tweets about the matter.
https://twitter.com/howelzy/status/937676363078696960
https://twitter.com/howelzy/status/936955750945083392
https://twitter.com/howelzy/status/937701912715186176
But the council want none of it, arguing “the cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds — without any guarantee of either finding the hardware or it still being in working order,” a spokesman said.
In other words, the hard drive has been sitting amongst trash for 4 years and is probably extremely fucked.
“The council has told the individual concerned on several occasions that excavation is not possible under our licencing permit, added to the fact excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area.”
Sorry bud, looks like you’re just gonna have to live with your mistake for the rest of your life. Bummer.
