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In 2013, a British computer scientist named James Howells dumped a hard drive with a virtual wallet containing what was then a little-known and practically nugatorial cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin.
Fast forward, and at the time of writing, a single bitcoin is trading at roughly $ 37,000, which means that the 7500 bitcoins contained on the hard drive would be roughly $ 275 million.
Now, the Newport, Wales venue has presented its city council with a large amount of cash if you allow it to search for a landfill where it believes the hard drive has been disposed of.
“I filed giving 25% or 52. 5 million pounds” – $71. 7 million – to the city of Newport to distribute to all local citizens living in Newport if I locate and bitcoins,” Howells told CNN.
Citing a population of about 300,000 for the Newport metropolitan area, Howells would mean about $175, or $240, according to the children.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “they turned down the be offer and might not even have a face-to-face conversation with me about it. “
Howells had extracted bitcoins for 4 years, while cryptocurrencies were still in their infancy and very little. Howells recalls throwing away the hard drive between June and August 2013, believing that he had already subsidized the files he needed.
First he learned of his mistake, he told BBC News, when the value of a single bitcoin rose to $1,000 from $150 in the same year.
After visiting the dump, Howells told the BBC that he thought he “had no chance” of recovering his hard drive, but now he has a new plan.
“The plan would be to excavate an express domain of the landfill based on a network and hard drive reference formula while assembling all the environmental and protection standards,” Howells told CNN on Friday.
“The reader would then introduce the knowledge and specialists who can rebuild the unit from scratch with new coins and try to access bitcoins with the small piece of knowledge I want. “
He added that if the plan was successful, about a quarter of the fortune would pass to the city of Newport, a portion would pass to the investors who financed the recovery and the rest to it.
However, in a message to CNN, a Spokeswoman for Newport City Council said the city was not legal to search for the site.
“The council has told Mr. Howells several times that the excavation is not imaginable under our licensing permit and that the excavation itself would have a massive environmental effect on the surrounding area,” he said.
“The charge for dumping, garageing and waste disposal can be millions of pounds, with no guarantee of locating it or it is still in operation. “
Howells, at least, is not in his misfortune: the New York Times reported Tuesday that bitcoins in lost wallets accounted for approximately 20% of the existing 18. 5 million bitcoins, for a total of $140 billion.
Wallet Recovery Services, a company that is helping to lose virtual keys, told The Times that it was receiving 70 requests a day from users looking to access their virtual wallets, a number that is 3 times greater than a month ago.