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UK Man Offers Council $72M if He Finds Discarded Bitcoin Trove at Landfill
The town of Newport in Wales could get a hefty reward if the treasure is found in the trash.
A U.K. IT engineer who mistakenly threw away a hard drive with around £210 million (US$288 million) of bitcoin on it is asking the local government once again to allow him to search the local landfill for his device.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
- James Howells dumped the hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoins back in 2013, and has had several requests to search the landfill denied. However, this time he is offering the local government in Newport, Wales, a reward of 25% of the bitcoin on that hard drive, which he said would go to a Covid Relief Fund for the city's residents, reports the South Wales Argus.
- "It’s quite a lot of money still sat there in the landfill," Howells told the publication, adding he would like to present an "action plan" to retrieve the physical hard drive.
- Bitcoin prices have climbed from $10,000 to $41,000 over the past three months. The price of bitcoin was at $38,417 at the time of publication, so this now makes the stash worth an estimated $288 million and the loss of his hard drive that much more painful.
- A spokeswoman for the Newport City Council told the Argus: “Even if we were able to agree to his request, there is the question of who would meet the cost [of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste] if the hard drive was not found or was damaged to such an extent that the data could not be recovered."
- Recently ex-Ripple Labs CTO Stefan Thomas shared his story with the New York Times about a digital wallet he is unable to access because he forgot his password, leaving his multimillion-dollar fortune in limbo.
Read more: UK Treasury Calls for Feedback on Approach to Cryptocurrency and Stablecoin Regulation
Tanzeel Akhtar
Tanzeel Akhtar has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, Forbes Africa, Financial Times, The Street, Citywire, Investing.com, Euromoney, Yahoo! Finance, Benzinga, Kitco News, African Business Magazine, Hedge Week, Campden Family Office, Modern Investor, Spear's Wealth Management Magazine, Global Investor, ETF.com, ETF Stream, CIO UK, Funds Global Asia, Portfolio Institutional, Interactive Investor, Bitcoin Magazine, CryptoNews.com, Bitcoin.com, The Local, The Next Web, Mining Journal, Money Marketing, Marketing Week and more. Tanzeel trained as a foreign correspondent at the University of Helsinki, Finland and newspaper journalist at the University of Central Lancashire, UK. She holds a BA (Honours) in English Literature from the Manchester Metropolitan University, UK and completed a semester abroad as an ERASMUS student at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. She is NCTJ Qualified - Media Law, Public Administration and passed the Shorthand 100WPM with distinction. She does not currently hold value in any digital currencies or projects.
