- A U.K. man hoping to retrieve a Bitcoin-laden hard drive from a city dump is offering to buy the landfill. That wallet today, the owner says, is worth nearly $770 million.
James Howells, who has spent the last 12 years trying to convince officials in the U.K. city of Newport to let him explore the city landfill, is now offering to buy the dump.
Howells believes the landfill contains an old hard drive of his that contains almost $770 million in Bitcoin. His attempts to excavate the drive through legal means hit a dead end in January, when a judge ruled he had “no realistic prospect of succeeding” in his effort if the case were to continue.
This year, however, the landfill is being closed and will reportedly be replaced by a solar farm. And Howells sees that as an opening.
“The council planning on closing the landfill so soon is quite a surprise, especially since it claimed at the High Court that closing the landfill to allow me to search would have a huge detrimental impact on the people of Newport, whilst at the same time they were planning to close the landfill anyway,” he told the UK media outlet Metro. “I would be potentially interested in purchasing the landfill site. I have discussed this option recently with investment partners and it is very much on the table.”
The whole situation started in the summer of 2013, when Howells accidentally put a laptop that contained his Bitcoin wallet (with 7,500 Bitcoin) in a black bag in the hall of his house. His partner at the time assumed the bag was filled with trash and disposed of it.
At the time, the price of a single Bitcoin was in the neighborhood of $100. Today, that stands at nearly $97,000.
Howells offered to split the value of the Bitcoin in the wallet with the city of Newport and had said he would pay for the excavation himself. Officials insist a search is impossible due to environmental permits—and that the hard drive became city property as soon as it entered the landfill.