The story of the man whose ex-partner threw away a USB drive with Bitcoins

On the outskirts of Newport, Wales, in a modest house filled with the memories of a shared life, lived James Howells. It was the year 2013, and for James, the Bitcoin craze was a distant buzz, almost a game. With his computer, he was dedicated to mining, unaware that each block of code he verified was, in fact, a digital gold bar. He mined thousands of Bitcoins, an astonishing amount for the time, and stored them on a regular hard drive, a small box of metal and circuits, with a simple password written on a post-it attached to its side.

Time passed, and as often happens, relationships change. His life partner, completely unaware of the importance of that little metal box, undertook a thorough cleaning. Clearing out years of clutter, the USB drive, with its golden secrets, was unceremoniously tossed into a trash bag along with other unused electronic gadgets. It was just another object in the path to home decluttering.

Years slipped by, and with them, Bitcoin, once a geek curiosity, transformed into a global phenomenon, skyrocketing its value to stratospheric levels. One day, a news story captured James's attention: Bitcoin had reached a new record. A chill of recognition, cold and piercing, ran down his spine. Suddenly, the image of that small USB drive, which contained the keys to thousands and thousands of Bitcoins, materialized in his mind. He rushed to find it, but it was no longer there. The post-it, the password, everything had disappeared. Reality hit him like a giant wave: his ex-partner, unknowingly, had thrown a fortune in the trash.

Desperation took hold of James. The Newport landfill, a mountain of waste stretching as far as the eye could see, became his nightmare. He knew, with agonizing certainty, that his treasure was there, buried under tons of garbage. #MarketPullback $BTC