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After accidently throwing away a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoin, worth around £4m at the time, James Howells believes the hard drive is now worth over £500m following recent price surges. Howells has spent the last decade trying to retrieve the hard drive, which he believes is in a Newport landfill site. His private key, used to access the coins, was stored on the hard drive. The drive remained in his desk drawer until 2013 when it was thrown out.
Despite repeatedly asking Newport council for access to the Docksway landfill site to search for the hard drive, the council has refused, stating that the excavation would not be possible under the site’s licensing permit, and the excavation would have a significant environmental impact. In light of this refusal, Howells offered the council 25% of the coin’s value to be used on local community projects, but this has since been reduced to 10%.
Last month, Howells announced he was suing Newport City Council for £495,314,800 in damages. “They [the council] are currently, in my opinion, withholding my property without my consent, and they’re not allowing me to search for it,” he explained to the BBC. “The last time we put an offer to them to meet, it was worth £500m, a few weeks ago, and they refused that.”
The landfill, located in Newport, South Wales, holds more than 1.4 million tonnes of waste, but despite this, Howells has narrowed the hard drive’s location to an area consisting of 100,000 tonnes. After reaching an all-time high of over £62k per unit, following former US President Donald Trump’s victory, the price of bitcoin has increased significantly. As for Howells, he speculates that the bitcoin on his hard drive could be worth £1bn by next year.
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