James Howells, an IT worker living in the United Kingdom, knows exactly where his misplaced 7,500 bitcoins are but the city council where he lives won't let him retrieve them. But, while cleaning his home in 2013, he mistakenly put it into a waste bin at his local landfill site in Newport, South Wales, where it got buried. Back in 2009, Howells set an old laptop to mining bitcoin – back before you needed specialised hardware – eventually totting up 7,500 coins. He later broke up the Dell M1710 into parts to sell on eBay, but kept the hard drive tucked away in a drawer in case bitcoin ever did take off. "A modern landfill is a complex engineering project and digging one up brings up all sorts of environmental issues, such as dangerous gasses and potential landfill fires," Howells says. "If they ever moved I would know," he says. "I have multiple tickers running with prices in different fiat currencies, but that's not because I’m obsessed with the price because of my lost coins," he said.
– When covering the story four years ago, Newser's headline read, "$7.5M Bitcoin Fortune Buried in Landfill." That fortune ended up in a Welsh landfill after James Howells threw out a hard drive over that summer while cleaning up his workspace. On it was the cryptographic "private key" he needed to access his 7,500 Bitcoins—which are now worth far, far more. With bitcoin valued at roughly $17,000 as of Wednesday, those 7,500 lost bitcoins are worth more than $127 million, reports CNBC. He tells the Telegraph that he hasn't "sat here crying about it, accidents happen." But that hasn't deterred him from hoping he'll one day get to go searching at the Newport landfill, something the Newport City Council currently won't allow. It would be a novel undertaking: "A landfill has never been excavated in the UK before" for non-criminal reasons, he says, "so we’re in uncharted territory with regards to regulations, local authorities and environmental agencies." And there are plenty of risks, from deadly gases to the possibility of landfill fires, not to mention the cost. But "the higher the value goes, the more chance I have to recover it," he says. Wired spoke with a rep from the city council, and the upshot isn't too optimistic, with the rep citing the huge costs of doing the excavating and storing the waste, plus the "huge environmental impact on the surrounding area"—and after all that, the hard drive might not be found or usable, though Howells has brushed off naysayers who argue the drive would be destroyed by corrosion at this point. (Read about a bitcoin crime.)