$770+ Million Landfill: Bitcoin dump saga continues
For the past decade, a Welsh man has been begging his city government for permission to peruse the contents of the local dump. 39-year-old Newport resident James Howells has been desperately asking to do this because, in 2013, he accidentally threw a hard drive containing 7,500 Bitcoin in the trash. Due to the cryptocurrency’s rise in value over the past ten years, those assets would be worth more than half a billion dollars today.
Unfortunately for Howells, the Newport City Council has repeatedly declined his request. Legislators have argued that delving into the landfill’s depths would violate regulations and could prove hugely damaging to the surrounding environment.
Howell has sued the council, asking for £495,314,800 in damages, Wales Online reports. The amount Howells is asking for is roughly the equivalent of what he would have made had he held onto the crypto-bearing drive. Howells told the local outlet that he doesn’t actually want that money from the council and is merely attempting to compel them to allow his excavation to go ahead. And now, after years of battling the local authority in court to retrieve the hard drive, Howells has come up with a new plan: to simply buy the landfill. “Am considering purchasing a landfill site. Funding secured,” he wrote Thursday on X, echoing comments by him that were widely reported in the U.K. media on Monday, though he didn’t say who was providing the funding.
It’s worth considering how much money Howells has been sinking into this quixotic pursuit. After all, the drive in question could very well be 1. lost forever and/or 2. thoroughly corrupted and unusable. If that’s the case, Howell has effectively wasted years of his life and a huge chunk of change on nothing. At the same time, were Howells to somehow get his mitts on his beloved drive, and were his crypto assets to somehow be in a retrievable format, he would never have to work again.
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