UK Man Offers Council $72M if He’s Allowed to Search Dump and Finds Discarded Bitcoin Trove
UK Man Offers Council $72M If He’s Allowed to Search Dump and Finds Discarded Bitcoin Trove
A UK IT engineer who mistakenly threw away a hard drive with around £210 million ($288 million) of bitcoin on it is applying to the local government to search wasteland for the device.
- James Howells threw away the hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoins in 2013 and is offering the local government in Wales 25% of the bitcoin as part of a Covid Relief Fund if it is retrieved, reports the South Wales Argus.
- So far, the local council in Wales has rejected his requests for permission to search the landfill sites.
- “It’s quite a lot of money still sat there in the landfill,” Howells told the South Wales Argus.
- A desperate Howells told the local newspaper he would like to present an “action plan” to retrieve the physical hard drive.
- Bitcoin prices have climbed from $10,000 to $41,000 over the past three months. As the price of bitcoin was at $38,417 at the time of publication, this now makes Howells’ inaccessible stash worth an estimated $288 million and the loss of his hard drive that much more painful.
- Recently ex-Ripple Labs CTO Stefan Thomas, shared his story with the New York Times about a digital wallet that he is unable to access due to forgetting his password leaving his multimillion-dollar fortune in limbo.
