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Waste Management Expert: UK Man's Chance of Recovering $279 Million Lost Bitcoin Nearly Zero

2025.02.25 23:40:20

February 25th - As per The Block, James Howells, an IT engineer from Newport, inadvertently discarded a hard drive that held Bitcoin worth $6.69 billion. Despite his attempts to gain access to the landfill site through legal channels or to acquire the site outright, a UK waste management expert has expressed doubts about the feasibility of recovery, claiming that the likelihood of finding the lost hard drive and retrieving $6.69 billion worth of Bitcoin is nearly zero. Howells, a computer engineer from Newport, South Wales, thinks that his former wife mistakenly got rid of the hard drive containing his Bitcoin wallet in 2013. He initiated legal proceedings, trying to access the local landfill site or requesting £4.95 billion ($6.09 billion) in compensation from the Newport City Council. During a December hearing, it was learned that Howells, as an early Bitcoin adopter, mined more than 7,500 bitcoins in 2009 when the value of Bitcoin was low. However, on January 9th, the judge dismissed the case, stating that due to the passage of a long time, the reasons for filing the lawsuit were insufficient, and "the probability of success if the case were to continue is almost zero." A UK commercial waste management company mentioned that even if Howells managed to access the site, the probability of him finding the hard drive among 1.4 million tons of garbage in the landfill is 1 in 9.02 billion.
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