So, picture this—it’s 2013, and some dude in Wales named James Howells is cleaning out his house. Normal stuff, right? Tossing old junk, maybe some clothes he doesn’t wear anymore, that kind of thing. Then, in a move that would later make him want to scream into a pillow forever, he chucks an old laptop hard drive into the trash.
No big deal… except that hard drive had 7,500 $BTC on it.
"Wait… Where’s My Hard Drive?"
At the time, Bitcoin wasn’t worth that much. A few bucks each, maybe. But fast-forward a few years, and suddenly, that little mistake turned into the world’s most expensive oops. By 2021, those lost coins would’ve been worth over half a billion dollars.
And where were they?
Buried under mountains of garbage in a Welsh landfill.
Begging to Dig Through Trash Like a Madman
James, realizing the sheer horror of what he’d done, went full-on treasure hunt mode. He pleaded with the local council to let him search the dump. He even offered to:
Pay for the whole operation himself.
Donate a chunk to the city.
Probably name his firstborn after the mayor if it helped.
But nope. The council said absolutely not.
Their reasoning? Environmental hazards, permits, blah blah blah. Basically, they didn’t want some guy with a shovel and a dream tearing up the landfill for a hard drive that might’ve been crushed into dust by a bulldozer years ago.
"But What If We Used Robots?!"
James wasn’t giving up. He got engineers involved, drew up plans for high-tech garbage sorting machines, even talked about AI and X-ray scanners. He was ready to turn this dump into a sci-fi excavation site—all for that one stupid hard drive.
Still, the city wouldn’t budge.
The Ultimate "What If" Nightmare
So now, James just… lives with it. Every time Bitcoin’s price swings up, he probably gets that sinking feeling in his gut. Somewhere under layers of rotting food and old diapers, there’s a hard drive that could’ve made him stupid rich.
And the worst part? He’ll never get it back.
Moral of the story?
Check your trash before you toss it.
Back up your dang crypto.
Maybe don’t store a fortune on a decade-old laptop.
(Sources: BBC, The Guardian, and probably a lot of whiskey-induced regret.)
