James Howells is a British IT worker and was an early Bitcoin ethusiast...
He may also be the most frustrated man in the world currently, but hopefully that's all about to change.
As The Independent reports, Howells began his fascination with the cryptocurrency in February 2009, and through his computational expertise, he mined 7,500 Bitcoins in the preceding years.
However, there was a woman in Howells' life and, as Gizmodo reports, his girlfriend got fed up with the noise of his block-mining hardware and made him stop. At the time, it was not a big loss he notes, bitcoin was worth next to nothing.
"After I had stopped mining, the laptop I had used was broken into parts and sold on eBay. However, I kept the hard drive in a drawer at home knowing it contained my Bitcoin private keys, so that if Bitcoin did become valuable one day I would still have the coins I had mined," he told the Telegraph.
Then "in mid-2013 during a clear-out, the hard drive was mistakenly thrown out and put into a general waste bin at my local landfill site, after which it was buried on site."
And so buried deep below thousands of tons of garbage on a Welsh landfill site, lies a hard drive with bitcoins potentially worth more than $100 million.
Four years later and he still - understandably - hasn’t let it go.
He says he’s now considering digging up the landfill in order to find the lost hard drive.
“A modern landfill is a complex engineering project and digging one up brings up all sorts of environmental issues such as dangerous gasses and potential landfill fires,” he said.
“It’s a big, expensive and risky project.”
