In 2013, 36-year-old engineer James Howell threw away the hard drive containing the cryptographic key to his Bitcoin wallet while clearing out his house.

Howell used to have two identical hard drives and ended up throwing away the wrong one, locking himself out of his 8,000 BTC holdings, which would be worth close to US$158 million as per the current exchange rate.

This hard drive ended up in a landfill in New Port, Wales. Howell has been trying to get permission to excavate the landfill to retrieve his lost drive for nearly a decade with no luck.

The local government of New Port believes that trying to dig up the drive would adversely affect the environment and has thus firmly denied his requests......