James Howells, a resident of the British city of Newport, is not giving up hope of finding a hard drive with a wallet containing 7,500 BTC, which was lost more than seven years ago, in a landfill.
Welsh IT professional James Howells was mining on a PC back in 2010 and then forgot about his past passion for cryptocurrency for a long time. In the summer of 2013, Howells accidentally threw away a hard drive while cleaning the house, and months later learned that the "trash" was worth several million dollars. The search proved fruitless. Those bitcoins are now worth nearly $300 million.
Over the past few years, Howells has repeatedly urged the Newport administration to allow him to conduct large-scale digs for a fee, but has been turned down each time. Recently, the unsuccessful miner appealed again to local authorities, offering them $72 million (about 25% of the value of the "treasure") as a donation to fight COVID-19 if he could recover the wallet. According to Howells, all he needs is access to the landfill records to determine the exact location of the hard drive. The search team will create an airtight seal to prevent the release of toxic gas from decomposing waste during the excavation.
"Given the environment the hard drive has been in all this time, there is no guarantee it will work. The outer casing is most likely corroded. But there is a possibility that the medium itself, where the data is stored, may have survived. I still have hope. But the longer the drive is in the landfill, the less chance it has," said the owner of the lost bitcoins.
City officials, however, aren't willing to go along with Howells. City government officials believe the excavation will not yield any results, and there could be serious environmental risks. In addition, if access to bitcoins cannot be restored, the costs associated with the excavation will be borne by the city. Howells is willing to put his own money into an escrow account for the City of Newport to cover the costs.
James Howells' story is one of the best-known precedents for irretrievably losing a large amount of BTC, but there are others. For example, cryptocurrency critic Peter Schiff was unable to recover his crypto-assets because he didn't save his wallet password or record a Sid phrase. And developer Stefan Thomas has only two attempts left to get the private key from the address with 7002 BTC. Of course, there are the lucky ones, too. A Reddit user recently managed to regain access to 127 BTC that had been stored in his wallet since 2011.