A hard drive binned by accident over a decade ago could unlock a bitcoin horde worth over £569 million (US$719.83 million) and the owner is now suing for it, reports the BBC.
James Howells purchased thousands of bitcoin (BTC) in the early days of the cryptocurrency. His private key – a digital code necessary to access the coins – was stored on his computer’s hard drive, which he later removed when upgrading his PC. The hard drive sat in a desk drawer until 2013 when it was thrown away in error. In the decade-plus since, Howells has repeatedly petitioned his local council to grant him access to Docksway Landfill in south Wales to search for the missing hard drive, already worth around £4 million at the time it was binned.
The council has consistently refused, saying excavation was “not possible” under its licensing permit and that “excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area.”
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Some details of Howells’ story have changed over the last 11 years. Previous reporting by the BBC has him losing 7,500 BTC while the most recent count is 8,000. The story about the binning has also changed, from Howell believing he’d removed everything of value “so it got thrown in the bin” to the recent account which pins the blame on his partner for accidentally throwing it away.
While a search would have been financially unfeasible for Howells in 2013, by 2021, he had the backing of financers willing to pay in exchange for a piece of his BTC wallet. Since at least 2017, he has been offering 10 percent of the wallet to local authorities if they will allow him to excavate. They still said no and last month, Howells filed suit against the Newport City Council for nearly £500 million in damages.
“They [the council] are currently, in my opinion, withholding my property without my consent and they’re not allowing me to search for it,” he recently told the BBC. While the landfill holds over 1.4 million tonnes of waste, Howells claims he has narrowed down the hard drive’s possible location to an area consisting of 100,000 tonnes. His insistence that the council “come and speak” to him about the matter is likely to fall on deaf ears. A Newport City Council spokesperson told the BBC, “The claim [by Howells] has no merit, and the council is vigorously resisting it.”
