For the past decade, a Welsh man has been begging his city government for permission to peruse the contents of the local dump. 39-year-old Newport resident James Howells has been desperately asking to do this because, in 2013, he accidentally threw a hard drive containing 7,500 Bitcoin in the trash. Due to the cryptocurrency’s rise in value over the past ten years, those assets would be worth more than half a billion dollars today.
Unfortunately for Howells, the Newport City Council has repeatedly declined his request. Legislators have argued that delving into the landfill’s depths would violate regulations and could prove hugely damaging to the surrounding environment.
Now, in an effort to compel the local government to carry out his wishes, Howell has sued the council, asking for £495,314,800 in damages, Wales Online reports. The amount Howells is asking for is roughly the equivalent of what he would have made had he held onto the crypto-bearing drive. Howells told the local outlet that he doesn’t actually want that money from the council and is merely attempting to compel them to allow his excavation to go ahead.
This is only the latest step in an increasingly desperate (and presumably quite costly) effort to recover the drive. The Register writes that, over the past ten years, Howells has “quit his job in IT and assembled a team of investors,” the likes of which will get to split the bulk of the assets, should the drive be found. Howells, meanwhile, plans to retain some 30 percent of its value.
Gizmodo reached out to the Newport City Council for comment. We will update this story when we receive a response.
Howells has claimed he will share a certain percentage of the profits from the hard drive with the local community, should he be able to retrieve it. In fact, Howell has made rather comical claims about the opportunity Newport’s legislators are missing out on by denying his request to scavenge the dump. “If they had spoken to me in 2013, this place would look like Las Vegas now,” Howell apparently told Wales Online. “Newport would look like Dubai. That’s the kind of opportunity they’ve missed.” It’s unclear whether the other local Newport denizens—whose city is already considered a fairly bustling metropolitan community—really want the local environs to resemble Las Vegas.
In a statement provided to The Register, the council said that it had “told Mr Howells multiple times that excavation is not possible under our environmental permit and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area.” It added: “The council is the only body authorized to carry out operations on the site.”
It’s worth considering how much money Howells has been sinking into this quixotic pursuit. After all, the drive in question could very well be A) lost forever and/or B) thoroughly corrupted and unusable. If that’s the case, Howell has effectively wasted years of his life and a huge chunk of change on nothing. At the same time, were Howells to somehow get his mitts on his beloved drive, and were his crypto assets to somehow be in a retrievable format, he would never have to work again—so you can sorta understand his zeal for this whole thing.
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