A programmer accidentally threw away 7,500 bitcoins worth 5.1 billion! He waited in a garbage dump for 11 years to retrieve his bitcoins, and said he would share the money with anyone who helped him dig them up.

A case involving the loss of 569 million pounds (about 5.19 billion RMB) of "garbage" in the UK will be heard in court soon. James's lawsuit against the city council for infringing his intellectual property rights will be heard in December.

It turned out that in 2013, a British programmer named James accidentally put a hard drive containing nearly 8,000 bitcoins into a drawer, and it was thrown away as garbage by his girlfriend at the time.

Since the value of Bitcoin was not high at the time, James did not care about it until November 2013, when he saw in the newspaper that a Norwegian successfully purchased an apartment worth $400,000 with 1,000 Bitcoins.

At this moment, James remembered that his old hard drive still contained the password for 7500 bitcoins. If he could exchange these bitcoins, wouldn’t he become a millionaire? But he soon realized that the bag containing the old hard drive had already been sent to the landfill.

The unyielding James confirmed after a long investigation that the bag of trash he threw away was buried in the nearby landfill. In addition, he calculated using a formula that the old hard drive was buried 5 centimeters underground.

With this result, James immediately applied to the local council to excavate the bag of trash. However, the city council rejected his application multiple times, citing concerns that excavation would cause serious pollution to the nearby environment and involve significant economic and manpower issues.

Since 2013, James has quit his job to search for the hard drive full-time. He started a crowdfunding campaign to recover the bitcoins and promised to share the profits with the contributors. Using the funds raised, he sought out a professional team to locate the specific position of the bitcoins. However, the city council has consistently refused to allow him to dig in the landfill, despite his promise that if he successfully excavated the hard drive and exchanged the bitcoins, he would donate 10% of the total value to the local government, transforming Newport into the next Dubai or Las Vegas.

In order to expedite the excavation of the landfill, in October of this year, James filed a lawsuit with the local court and presented a brand new accusation. It turns out that in the previous 11 years of litigation, James had been accusing the city council of seizing his hard drive and infringing on his assets. This time, at the suggestion of his top-notch legal team, he changed his accusation to the city council for seizing the hard drive and infringing on the intellectual property contained on it.

His case will be heard in December, and if James wins, he might excavate 7500 BTC.