According to recent reports, a man who lost $800 million in Bitcoin wants to purchase the rubbish dump. According to James Howells, who unintentionally tossed away the hard drive in 2013, it contains the key to over $800 million in bitcoin that is hidden deep beneath layers of old trash at a landfill in Wales.
After years of battling the local government in court to reclaim the hard drive, Howells has now come up with a new plan: he will just purchase the dump.
Howells added that he was considering purchasing a landfill. Reiterating comments that were extensively covered by the British media on Monday, he tweeted on Thursday that funding had been secured. He did not, however, identify the financial source.
He wants to purchase the trash dump since he lost $800 million in Bitcoin
Howells has tried almost everything to get access to the Docksway Landfill in Newport, a city 12 miles (19 kilometers) northeast of Cardiff, the capital of Wales.
In 2021, he asked Newport City Council for permission to excavate the site for more than $70 million. His latest tactic comes after a British High Court judge rejected his attempts to force the municipality to allow him to search the dump in January, delaying his case from going to trial.
Howells accidentally threw away that crucial hard drive in August 2013 when organizing his house because he thought it was a blank drive with no data on it.
He put it in a trash bag he left in the hallway for his then-partner to take to the landfill before discovering, as the value of bitcoin rose, that he had rid of the incorrect one.
The value of the bitcoin that Howells says is kept on the hard drive has skyrocketed from roughly $9 million to roughly $800 million due to the recent spike in cryptocurrency pricing.
It is crucial to emphasize that each Bitcoin transaction requires a private key, which is a piece of private data stored in each wallet and serves as mathematical proof that the transaction came from that wallet.
Judge Andrew Keyser stated in his January decision that Howells’ hard drive contains “a record” of the secret key.
Theoretically, the scenario is identical to what would have occurred if the private key’s record had been written on a piece of paper that had been thrown away in a landfill, according to Keyser.
Howells won’t be able to access the coins she mined back when the cryptocurrency was mostly unknown outside of the computer industry if he doesn’t have the private key, as many people may not be aware.
The council had frequently told Mr. Howells that excavation was not allowed by our licensing authority and that the operation would have a major adverse environmental impact on the surrounding area, according to a spokesman at the time.
With no guarantee that the landfill would be found or continue to operate, millions of pounds could be spent on its excavation, storage, and treatment.
Will consumers be able to get their lost bitcoins back, or will they end up in the trash?
Given that Bitcoin forbids counterfeiting and since transactions are essentially irreversible, security is a top concern. Once someone has your bitcoins, they will always have them, but if you forget your password, they can wind up in the trash.
This is similar to how passwords can be forgotten or discarded, preventing hackers from accessing your information. Chris and Charlie Brooks, father-son proprietors of CryptoAssetRecovery.com, have been assisting customers who have lost their passwords in recovering Bitcoin and other digital assets since 2017 despite the high level of security.
It goes without saying that not all digital assets are recoverable. It’s likely that corrupted or destroyed hard drives will never be recovered.
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However, according to Crypto Asset Recovery, you stood a decent chance of getting your lost wealth back if you had encrypted private keys but couldn’t remember your password or if your hard drive broke and you had private keys on it. Even if they can break open an old hard drive, former Bitcoin owners may not have any money in their wallets despite having lost their long-lost wealth there. This is a result of their skepticism over the existence of their lost fortune.