Hard drive with £4 million pounds worth of bit coins thrown out with the rubbish

I heard this guy talking to Jeremy Vine today on Radio 2 and thought I'd share this with ATS.

James Howells mined about 7,500 bit coins in 2009, before being deterred from continuing by his girlfriend because it was slowing their laptop Dow and making it noisy. Some time later he knocked a beverage over the laptop and it stopped working. He dismantled the laptop and stored the hard drive in a drawer for 4 years and sold other parts of the laptop that were re-usable.

Now here's the killer for him. He decided to clear out some of his IT equipment that he had been hoarding and as a consequence threw out the hard drive in the refuse collection and has just realised his mistake and what a mistake. £4 million of bit coin currently in a landfill in Wales, potentially buried under 4-5 feet of waste.

A Newport man has been searching a landfill site in south Wales hoping to find a computer hard drive he threw away which is now worth over £4m.

"I kept the hard drive in a drawer in my office for three years without a second thought - totally forgot about bitcoin all together. I had been distracted by family life and moving house.

"When I went to the tip the manager took me up to the current landfill site and when I saw it - it's about the size of a football field - my first thought was 'no chance'," he said.

I never got into collecting or purchasing bit coins, but I have been following its rise in value over the last year or so. I am aware that a number of ATS members have invested in bit coins, but £4 million worth? What an expensive mistake!!

www.bbc.co.uk...

On my local radio Wales today,they were saying as a joke that there were already loads of people digging through the rubbish to find the HDD.
I doubt it was actually a joke..
People are skint in Wales at the moment.

If only he had stored his Bitcoin ID on a memory stick...
Bet he's inconsolable.

To me this seems like the perfect illustration of my reservations about bitcoin: It's completely indistinguishable from nothing at all if the computer is turned off. I fail to understand why opponents of "the system" are putting their faith in a currency based on access to major corporate infrastructure (power and telecommunications serving computers with a maximum shelf life of 3 years, all of it irrevocably on the grid and subject to monitoring or manipulation by a select few with the skills and resources).

What I don't understand is how that HDD is the only record of those "digital coins".

Someone deny my ignorance…

The Vagabond
or manipulation by a select few with the skills and resources).

just like what happens with regular currency then

reply to post by haven123


My point exactly. It feels to me like Bitcoin is another financial weapon being released against us, with the capacity to trap people into dependence on major private infrastructure networks, increase the visibility of "underground" transactions, and to bubble and crash in a controllable way, through mechanisms too complicated for the average person to question.

And what do we have now, but a viral treasure hunt for bitcoins in a poor area. When a story like this is promoted by the media, it reinforces the supposed reality, value, and benefit to the poor of a coin that was never even minted but which computers assure us is worth about as much as a half ounce gold coin in your hand.

None of the information that comes to me about bitcoin makes any sense- it's all too positive and superficial- not nearly as contentious as the one day media storm that would hypothetically take place between the conception of the idea and its abortion by a treasury department raid if Cornhole, Iowa were to replace US dollars with a corn-farming based scrip.

This keeps timing me out.

What I was trying to type is that this story sounds like more horse #.

The only thing this story proves is that there is a man so stupid that he would throw away a harddrive with bitcoins on it. If he is truly such a moron then he probably uses paperbacks as toilet paper as well.

My opinion at this point is all these stories coming out are complete horse # to try and make Bitcoin seem unstable. It may very well be but my opinion of what is really going on is that banking cartels probably dislike open source currency.

Time will tell.

reply to post by OrphanApology


I do have a difficulty trying to comprehend how you would throw a Hard drive with £4 million in bit coins stored on it. He must have been tracking its value and therefore had some idea of what they were worth?

He seemed fairly relaxed about it on the radio and didn't come across as an idiot. However, he must feel like the biggest fool in Wales currently.

If it is genuine, I really hope he is reunited with the hard drive.