Bitcoin Forum

There’s a missing hard drive waiting to be found in a landfill. It’s contents – $72 million in bitcoin

Back in 2013, James Howells made headlines when the story of his missing hard drive came to light. Howells was an early Bitcoiner who mined 7,500 Bitcoins back in 2009 with his laptop – when the cryptocurrency was still easily mineable, and barely worth anything.

According to The Guardian, he mined them on a Dell laptop for over a week and stopped mining because his girlfriend complained the laptop was too noisy and hot. In 2010, he accidentally spilled lemonade on his Dell laptop, so he dismantled it for parts. The hard drive in which the Bitcoins were in were kept in went to a drawer, in which it stayed for three years, until one day he had a clearout.

When clearing out his old IT equipment, he didn’t remember the hard drive had money in it, so he just threw it away. At the time, he said “you know when you put something in the bin, and in your head, say to yourself ‘that’s a bad idea’? I really did have that.” When he realized what he had done, he searched for a backup, an accidental copy, something that could give him access to the money, but didn’t find anything.

The 7,500 BTC, at the time he threw them out worth over $600,000, and at the time his story made headlines worth over $5 million, were lost in a landfill in Newport. Howells did what he could to get his money back:

I had a word with one of the guys down there, explained the situation. And he actually took me out in his truck to where the landfill site is, the current ditch they’re working on. It’s about the size of a football field, and he said something from three or four months ago would be about three or four feet down.

He was even told that when police try to find something in the landfill, a team of 15, including diggers and personal protection equipment, was used. He couldn’t fund such an operation, so he resigned, and set up a wallet for donations:

Fast forward, and we’re nearing the end of 2017. Bitcoin is now worth over $9,700 and is making its way to $10,000. That hard drive, with 7,500 BTC in it, is now worth $72 million and, as far as we know, may still be out there, waiting to be found.

At the time, a Newport council spokesperson emphasized that treasure hunters wouldn’t be allowed in the landfill and that if it was easily retrieved, it’d be returned. Howells stated:

“I’m at the point where it’s either laugh about it or cry about it. Why aren’t I out there with a shovel now? I think I’m just resigned to never being able to find it.”

A cryptocurrency enthusiast

At the time, Howells still made it clear he believed Bitcoin was the future of money. Per his own words, it was going to go higher, as it was the next step of the internet. He even added: “When I first came across it, I knew straight away. We had everything else at the time; Google, Facebook, they were already the market leaders in their areas. The only thing that was missing was an internet money.”

The Twitter account associated with James Howells now shows support for Bitcoin Cash (BCH), a cryptocurrency that still maintains some of Bitcoin’s early properties, in a time in which Bitcoin itself deals with a transaction backlog and high fees.

In 2013, Howells revealed he was thinking about registering a website, www.returnmyBitcoin.com, hoping someone would find the hard drive. If it hasn’t been found and isn’t broken or damaged, there’s life-changing money in it.

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/missing-hard-drive-with-7500-bitcoin-now-worth-72-million/

It might sting a bit for that person looking back now, but we all have experienced things that if we now look back, should have done differently. If I look back to all things I could have done differently in my years in crypto land, I would be a millionaire by now, but unfortunately, that's how things go in life. I am happy that I have been holding a certain number of Bitcoin's without selling anything, and will keep holding and not selling for many more years to come. When Bitcoin reaches +$100,000 levels somewhere in the future, which I definitely believe is going to happen, it means that this dude will once again think back about how things could have been for him.

I think at some point it's going to be worth to organize a treasure hunt. We could announce this thing on gofundme or something. There are groups of people looking for lost treasures of the Nazi, why not this thing? The only problem is that going through a dump so big and so old would create a huge biohazard for the people involved and the drive might not even be there. I've seen people who live off dumpster diving and they sell electronics other people throw out. That HDD might have been found long ago, wiped and sold as used.

I don't think even if they would search for it they would be able to find it. When he started looking (already a couple of years ago) the disk, assuming it was still there, it would've already been burried under 2-3 feet of waste. So you can imagine how deep it would be burried now.

There's no way to find out but that could've been the case we'll proabbly never know. Moral of the story: never listen to your girlfriend (I'm joking).

Perhaps he will, but there is no point into doing so. If you don't properly take care of backing up everything, it means that you don't take things seriously at all. To add, even if he didn't lose access to his coins, he very well may have ended up selling his coins well before reaching $1000 for the first ever time. It would still have made him a massive amount of money, but by far not as close as he would when selling at current levels. Now we're talking about this, how about the guy who spent 10,000BTC to buy himself two pizza's? Every time this dude orders a pizza again, he'll enjoy them a little bit less due to that. :D

Pirate40 ponzi scheme would be worth today 5 billions of dollars.

Think of all the smaller scams that people didn't give much attention back in the day. Most of these people (if they haven't sold already) have Bitcoins worth over 1 million USD each. It's incredible how stealing something small like $1000 from someone on this forum in 2012 could make you a millionaire now. And they say crime doesn't pay.

Don't they destroy or incinerate trash in Landfills?  Or bury the trash way underground in giant dugged holes?