After 12 years of searching.. A British engineer abandons the attempt to recover 8000 Bitcoins lost in a landfill
James Howells, an IT engineer from Wales, announced his surrender after more than a decade of attempts to recover a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoins, which are now valued at approximately 911 million dollars.
Howells was one of the early enthusiasts of Bitcoin, and he started mining it in 2009 on his personal computer, accumulating around 8,000 cryptocurrencies that were worth less than a million dollars at the time.
But one mistake turned his life upside down. In the summer of 2013, while cleaning his office, he accidentally disposed of a hard drive containing the private key to his cryptocurrency wallet. The drive ended up in a massive landfill containing over 100,000 tons of garbage in Newport.
As the years passed and the value of Bitcoin rose to hundreds of millions, the frantic search began. James tried dozens of times to obtain permission from the city council to excavate the landfill, but he was met with refusals due to environmental, health, and legal risks. He resorted to ambitious proposals that included using robots, drones, and artificial intelligence to locate the hard drive, and he offered to donate a significant portion of his wealth to the local community.
Despite these efforts, James lost his legal battle in early 2025 when the Supreme Court ruled that his attempts were "not realistically hopeful," and that the drive had legally become the property of the landfill. After more than 12 years of hope and perseverance, James Howells finally announced his official surrender.
Source: Coinness. $BTC
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