Ten years ago, in 2013, James Howells accidentally threw away his computer hard drive while cleaning his house, forgetting that it contained information about his Bitcoins.
The IT engineer had mined 8,000 Bitcoins in the early stages of the cryptocurrency’s development, which had risen in value to more than $100 million, and put them on the hard drive, which he temporarily placed in a black garbage bag.
Howells had to fight a legal battle to retrieve the drive from the landfill, which is guarded 24 hours a day by a network of video cameras.
The digital currency stored on the hard drive will soon be worth $800 million by the end of the year, if Bitcoin’s value continues on its current trajectory.
But recovering the drive from the trash will require digging up a potential 100,000 tons of rubbish buried at the Newport Household Waste Recycling Centre in South Wales.
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