Missing: Hard Drive Containing Bitcoins Worth £4m in Newport Landfill
Review News November 28, 2013 Comments Off on Missing: Hard Drive Containing Bitcoins Worth £4m in Newport Landfill 29The 7,500 Bitcoins on the hard drive were worth around £500,000 when it was thrown in the rubbish. Since then, the value has soared. Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA
Buried somewhere under four feet of mud and rubbish, in the Docksway landfill site near Newport, Wales, in a space about the size of a football pitch is a computer hard drive worth more than £4m.
It belonged to James Howells, who threw it out when he was clearing up his desk in mid-summer and discovered the part, rescued from a defunct Dell laptop. He found it in a drawer and put it in a bin.
And then last Friday he realised that it held a digital wallet with 7,500 Bitcoins created for almost nothing in 2009 – and then worth about the same.
“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,” Howells, who works in IT, told the Guardian. “I don’t have an exact date, the only time period I can give – and I’ve been racking my own brains – is between 20 June and 10 August. Probably mid-July”. At the time he obliviously threw them away, the 7,500 Bitcoins on the hard-drive were worth around £500,000. Since then, the cryptocurrency’s value has soared, passing $1,000 on Wednesday afternoon.
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