Digital treasure still buried in dumpsite in Wales

It has been nearly 11 years since the launch of Bitcoin. And everyone who is into digital currencies, knows what BTC price has been through.

Bitcoin’s surge in 2017, which led it to the price of $20,000 is quite well-known now. However, early movers to the crypto industry – those who entered it few years since the launch of Bitcoin  – never even dreamed that something like that might lie in its future.

There are numerous stories about early investors who either got rich due to their early interest or who got rid of their coins and regretted it quite strongly in years to follow.

One of the best-known stories tells about a James Howells, the British IT specialist, who entered the crypto mining industry back in its early days.

Howell got interested in Bitcoin and started mining it back in 2009. He was so hyped with the idea and mined more than 7,500 digital coins per week. At the time Bitcoins were worth less than a penny, so Howell decided to simply store them hoping, their price might go up someday.

As time went on, the price did not rise. And Howell sold the laptop which was used to mine virtual coins. But he kept the hard drive, that still contained the wallet with Bitcoins. Just in case those keys ever turned out to be useful. 

After a while, however, he accidentally tossed out the hard drive during a clearout, and it ended up buried in a landfill in Wales.

Unfortunately, that happened at the same time when Bitcoin’s price started rising. Only two weeks after James Howells had thrown away the hard drive, he found out that the worth of his Bitcoins had climbed up to $2 million.

Howells applied for permission to try and dig it out from the dumpsite. However, the municipality, that adds nearly 50,000 tons of trash to the landfill each year, refused to grant a permission, stating that there are environmental risks that are simply too high.

A few more years had passed, and 2017 brought the most impresive surge in Bitcoin’s price that the crypto world had never witnessed before. During this period, and especially during those few days while Bitcoin was at its peak — the worth of that hard drive climbed to the price of $146 million.

To this day, Howells never received permission to seek out his hard drive, which is now worth nearly $50 million. In other words, somewhere in a dumpsite in Wales, there is a massive pot of digital money buried after several hundred tons of trash, that most likely will never be found again.