I’ll give you £55m to find my Bitcoins
IT expert begs council to search landfill after he threw away cryptocurrency now worth £200m
AN IT expert who accidentally threw away a hard drive containing Bitcoin now worth £210million has offered a council £55million to dig up a rubbish tip to find the device.
James Howells, 35, from Newport, South Wales, dumped the drive in 2013 during a clear- out of old computer equipment.
But he did not realise he had £5million worth of the cryptocurrency stored on it. Since then the value of Bitcoin – an encrypted digital currency – has risen by 4,100 per cent, and the contents of the drive are now worth more than £210million at the current exchange rate.
In a bid to retrieve his lost fortune Mr Howells has offered Newport Council a quarter of the money if they will help him find the drive. He believes the hard drive – which is buried at a local landfill site – and its contents could still be recovered despite being exposed to the elements for so long.
The council has so far said it is unable to help Mr Howells in his search, despite his offer to cover the costs to find the hard drive.
Mr Howells bought 7,500 Bitcoin shortly after the cryptocurrency’s launch for £20 each. A single Bitcoin is now worth £28,167.50.
He said: ‘There’s a pot of gold for someone at the end of the rainbow – and that end’s in the landfill site. I had two identical hard drives and I threw out the wrong one. I know I’m not the only person who has ever thrown out the wrong thing but it usually doesn’t cost people over £200million.
‘There is going to be a point when the files on that machine are worth more than a billion pounds – the attitude of the council does not compute.’
Bitcoins were first introduced in 2008 by someone known only as Satoshi Nakamoto. The coins do not physically exist and are not backed by any central bank. Coins can be bought, sold and ‘mined’ – a process carried out by computers programmed to solve complicated mathematical problems.
By searching through the landfill site’s records, Mr Howells believes he can find the approximate location of the hard drive before he has even started digging. He has even secured funding from a hedge fund to cover the costs of the recovery operation.
The council said: ‘The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds – without any guarantee of either finding it or it still being in working order.’
It comes as Stefan Thomas, 32, faces losing a £175million Bitcoin fortune because he cannot remember a password. The San Francisco-based IT expert has just two more attempts to guess the password before it is lost for ever.
It will unlock a drive known as an IronKey, which contains access to a digital wallet with the currency. But it only allows the password to be entered incorrectly ten times before it encrypts itself for good.
‘Their attitude does not compute’