Posted on 12/21/2021 12:49:51 PM PST by Red Badger
Whilst doing some Spring cleaning back in 2013, a man threw his old PC hard drive into the trash, which quickly joined the mountain of rubbish at his local landfill site in Newport, Wales, UK. Little did he know at the time, that same hard drive contained a wallet filled with 7,500 Bitcoin, worth a cool £500,000 ($665,000) in the early crypto days. Now? That wallet is worth $357 million.
Once he realized, the man began a desperate search for the hard drive and has been searching ever since. Over the past eight years, James Howells has been crawling through mounds of rubbish in the hunt for his $350 million needle in a haystack – a haystack the size of a football pitch.
video at link...............
"I had a word with one of the guys down there, explained the situation. And he actually took me out in his truck to where the landfill site is, the current ditch they're working on. It's about the size of a football field, and he said something from three or four months ago would be about three or four feet down,” said Howells in an interview with the Guardian back in 2013.
"I'm at the point where it's either laugh about it or cry about it. Why aren't I out there with a shovel now? I think I'm just resigned to never being able to find it."
After that conversation, Howells all but resigned to the fact his fortune would never be claimed. But soon after, he began a search himself and still believes there is hope that the drive is both reachable and readable in its likely deteriorated state. In a last-ditch effort, he has now recruited residents of his local town to join the hunt, with the promise of millions if the search succeeds.
The odds are certainly stacked against him, made worse by the Newport council’s refusal for any volunteers to enter the site. Citing the ecological damage trawling through buried rubbish would cause, a lack of a permit to search the rubbish, and the sheer uncertainty that the hard drive even lays there, the council will not allow anyone to search the mounds, CNBC reports.
Sadly, if Howells can’t find the drive, the Bitcoin is lost forever.
Like most crypto, Bitcoin is untraceable and you couldn’t back-up your wallet in the early days of mining. This has led to unfortunate scenarios where people lose the physical drive the crypto is on, like Howells, or forget their password – such as the man who has just a few guesses left before he is locked out of a $240 million Bitcoin fortune.
You fool it’s not on the hard drive ,LOL
This would most definitely be an occurrence repeated here
at least once. The main deterrent in moving forward.
When one has so little knowledge, it’s best to avoid any transaction until well schooled on the subject. That’s quite a nest egg to be lost and never seen again.
... Had he offered it to me, I’d have gladly accepted (for the children, you understand)
My m-i-l lost some very valuable jewelry which turned out, years later when it was found, to have slipped down into the couch cushions, way down where the arm of the couch is connected to the seat.
It was found by someone just checking before vacuuming it out, like every parent with kids does who doesn’t want to vacuum up toys or coins.
Most everything we do consists of taking things off of or out of the ground, and everything we take off of or out of the ground ends up...back on or in the ground.
Great story!
Thanks. I can certainly “feel his pain”, but only from the waist up!
i hope they dug test holes looking for addresses and dates on letters, magazines etc
That hard drive would be toast by now.
bad mistake, very careless
Heh, funny you would say that. I am losing weight (just getting older) and my rings are floating all around...the one I lost recently, my wife found it between cushions in my favorite chair. The time before that, we had to go back to a parking lot and look around, and it had just fallen off and we found it. I don’t think we will find this one, though.
I have a ring guard on my wedding band, I would be heartbroken to lose that.
I celebrate that you found it.
When Bitcoin first came out it was worth almost nothing. One guy famously bought a couple pizzas with thousands of bitcoin back in 2010. At today’s prices, those pizzas cost him more than $250 million each.
I don’t know about other states, but Florida lottery scratch-off tickets expire 6 months after the game ends. We had some
winning tickets rejected because they were too old..................
UK........................
“True wealth comes from out of the ground.” - old adage.
Apparently this is true........................
LOL, it doesn’t do those junkies any good when they look at the tickets under glass, though...:)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.