A British man who threw away millions in Bitcoin feels like garbage.
James Howells claims he chucked a hard drive loaded with 7,500 Bitcoins into the trash during the summer of 2013, believing the cryptocurrency was worthless. Now, he’s offering Welsh city officials more than $70 million if they allow him to excavate the landfill, reported CNN.
He has asked Newport City Council for permission to dig a specific section of the landfill site where he believes the hard drive wound up.
In return, Howells has offered to fork over one-quarter of the current value of his Bitcoin, which he claims is worth $273 million, to the city council if he recovers the hard drive.
“I offered to donate 25% . . . in order to distribute to all local residents who live in Newport should I find and recover the bitcoins,” Howells explained to CNN. “This would work out to approximately ($239) per person for the entire city. Unfortunately, they refused the offer and won’t even have a face-to-face discussion with me on the matter.”
Despite the seemingly dire needle-in-a-haystack odds of retrieving the hard drive, Howells has a detailed plan to find it by digging a specific area of the dump based on a grid system.
But Newport City Council officials claim they’ve heard this story before.
“The council has told Mr. Howells on a number of occasions that excavation is not possible under our licensing permit and excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area,” noted an unidentified council spokeswoman. “The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds — without any guarantee of either finding it or it still being in working order.”
As of Saturday, the exchange rate for one Bitcoin equals 36,415.70 U.S. dollars.
