Lost disk with bitcoins in the landfill
It became known that the court has forbidden the British man to search for a lost hard disk with 8000 bitcoins in a landfill.
A resident of the city of Newport in Wales, demanded from the local authorities to allow excavation at the city dump.
He wanted to find an accidentally discarded hard drive containing bitcoins. The lawsuit against the authorities of Newport was filed by 39-year-old James Howells.
James claims that in 2013, his girlfriend mistakenly threw away a hard drive that held about eight thousand bitcoins.
At the time, the bitcoins were worth $7.5 million dollars; at today’s exchange rate, they are worth more than $750 million dollars.
According to Howells, he mined the bitcoins in 2009 and forgot about them. He accidentally spilled a drink on the computer with the disk and then took it apart.
He sold some of the parts, and the hard drive sat in his desk drawer for several years until it accidentally ended up in the trash.
Later, when the cryptocurrency started to rise, Howells remembered that he had bitcoins – and realized he had lost the drive.
In total, more than 1.4 million tons of waste are stored in the landfill where Howells believes the bitcoin hard drive is located.
Howells claims that he was able to determine exactly where to look for the drive, and to do so, 100,000 tons of trash must be examined.