James Howells has been thinking about trash for 8 years. Tons of thousands of garbage separating you from your dream of being a billionaire.
Like many hundreds of other people, James Howells became a billionaire by accident, From overnight.
In 2013 he had in his possession 7,500 bitcoins which I had bought for a few thousand dollars when they went on sale, and they were very cheap.
But that year the first boom of Bitcoin. It had risen from $ 150 to $ 1,000 in just a few weeks. Suddenly, James Howells had in his power a digital wallet worth 5 million euros.
It was then that the nightmare began. He discovered that he had mistakenly thrown away the hard drive where he kept the bitcoins.
He tried to get Newport City Council in South Wales let him look at the municipal landfill, unsuccessfully. I include came to offer 25% of the bitcoins as a reward to municipal authorities.
He has spent 8 years litigating and asking the city for permission to search the landfill for the hard drive. Now those 7,500 bitcoins are worth 316 million euros, with today’s price.
“That’s a lot of bitcoins lying there on the ground and I have no doubt that next year they will be worth 750, 800 or even 900 million dollars.“, he explains in an interview on CNN.
“It could be the case that the hard drive is worth a billion dollars and not acting on it would be an incompetence on the part of the City Council. It is not a problem that will go away“, has commented.
The city council argues that the hard drive must be buried about 15 meters deep, under thousands of tons of garbage.
Removing the landfill would cost millions of euros, there is a risk of environmental contamination, and there is no guarantee that the disc will appear. And if it does, it is unlikely that it will still work, after years corroded by garbage.
In addition, the council itself only licensed to store trash, not to remove or poke at it.
As explained Bussiness Insider, James howells has started the final offensive. Has hired NASA experts who worked on the Columbia disaster to retrieve data, as well as engineers and ecologists to measure environmental impact and calibrate risks, and cost.
The city council continues to put as the main obstacle that there is no guarantee of finding it, and therefore not that James Howells can pay the expenses of removing the entire landfill.
Howells assures that has gotten money from an investment fund that he agrees to pay all expenses, in exchange for a portion of the bitcoins, which he has not disclosed.
Have calculated that the search would last between 9 and 12 months, and believes that the hard drive is located in an area of about 200 square meters, at a depth of 15 meters. It even has a team equipped with artificial intelligence to locate it.
Even if you manage to find it, you will still have to face another challenge just as complicated: recover the contents of the hard drive, which after 8 years in the trash could be erased or corrupted.
It’s a man’s desperate fight against his bad luck. Fate has yet to say its last word, but hopes are slim.