Guy Offers $71 Million To City Dump Yard, To Find Hard Drive With 7500 Bitcoins

What if you had a lottery ticket worth $275 million that you just lost due to your carelessness?

A man in the UK is feeling exactly the same, except in this case it wasn¡¯t a lottery ticket but with a hard drive with a digital wallet consisting of 7,500 bitcoins.

CNN Via Shutterstock

Reported first by CNN, the British IT worker, James Howells threw away a hard drive in 2013 with the bitcoin data on it after he thought he had backed up all the information. However, later he realised that it didn¡¯t and now it¡¯s a little too late.

And now, in order to find that hard drive again, he offered the city council of Newport, Wales, 25 percent cut of his 7,500 bitcoins (which amounts to $71.7 million) to help him excavate the dump to find his hard drive.

Howells in a conversation with CNN said, "I offered to donate 25% or ?52.5 million (approximately $71.7 million) to the city of Newport in order to distribute to all local residents who live in Newport should I find and recover the Bitcoins. This would work out to approx ?175 ($239) per person for the entire city (316,000 population). Unfortunately, they refused the offer and won't even have a face to face discussion with me on the matter."

This wasn¡¯t the first time Howells went to look for his hard drive in the trash. In 2013, after mining the bitcoins for four years, he threw away the drive, thinking he'd backed up all the data. When in 2013, Bitcoin¡¯s rate spiked from $150 to $1,000, his wallet rose in value to $ 6 million. But when he found the data didn¡¯t exist, he rushed to the landfill but didn¡¯t get quite lucky.

However, this time had devised a new plan where he was going to dig a specific area of the landfill depending on a grid reference system and recover the hard drive while keeping safety and environment standards in check. This drive would have then been presented to data recovery specialists who could rebuild the drive from scratch and recover data files to access bitcoins.

He added, "The value of the hard drive is over ?200m (around $273 million), and I'm happy to share a portion of that with the people of Newport should I be given the opportunity to search for it. Approximately 50% would be for investors who put up the capital to fund the project, and I would be left with the remaining 25%."

Shutterstock

Sadly, Newport CityCouncil spokeswoman said in a statement to CNN that they weren¡¯t going to allow excavation of the site, "The council has told Mr Howells on a number of occasions that excavation is not possible under our licensing permit and excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area. "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."

So it looks like Mr Howells is really out of luck for this one.