A man who accidentally threw away a hard disk with 7,500 bitcoins in 2013 is not giving up. He has filed a lawsuit against the city authorities — they won’t let him turn over the landfill in search of the HDD.
For the past decade, James Howells, a Welshman, has been pleading with the authorities in Newport to give him permission to search the local dump to no avail. These efforts are worth the possible reward — due to the rising price of 7500 bitcoins, they are now worth about half a billion dollars.
The Newport City Council has repeatedly rejected his request. Officials believe that stirring up the depths of the landfill could cause enormous environmental damage. In an attempt to force the council’s hand, Howells filed a lawsuit demanding £495,314,800 — the approximate value of the hard drive’s contents. The crypto wallet owner says he doesn’t really want money from the authorities, only consent to excavate the dump.
In fact, the search for the missing wealth is very burdensome for Howells. The lawsuit is just the latest step in an increasingly desperate effort. Over the past ten years, he has quit his job in IT and assembled a team of investors who will share the reward if the disk is found. The owner is to receive only a third of the value.
Howells says he will share the rest with the local community if he can recover the drive:
«If they were talking to me in 2013, this place would look like Las Vegas now. Newport would look like Dubai. That’s the opportunity they missed».
The city council says it told Mr. Howells several times that excavation was not possible under the environmental permit and that work of this nature would have a huge negative impact on the environment.
In the end, the coveted HDD may well be lost forever and completely damaged and unusable. So the question arises whether all these years have not been spent on something illusory.
Sources: Wales Online, Gizmodo
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