Bitcoin Investor Loses $700 Million Wallet in Landfill and Plans to Dig It Up

Metaverse Planet April 28, 2025Last Updated: April 28, 2025

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A bewildered Bitcoin investor accidentally threw away a wallet now worth 700 million dollars, and he now wants to buy the landfill to dig it out by hand.

James Howells, a British IT worker, mined over 7,500 Bitcoins back in 2009. At that time, when Bitcoin was mined like crazy but had very little value, his entire collection wasn’t even worth 10,000 dollars.

The crypto miner, who stored his mined Bitcoins on a hard drive, accidentally discarded the wrong drive years later, mixing it up with other old hard drives.

When he recently decided to cash out his Bitcoins — which have now skyrocketed to 700 million dollars — he realized he had thrown away the very hard drive he thought he had safely kept for 15 years.

James Howells now wants to buy the massive landfill where the hard drive was discarded. In a desperate attempt to recover his fortune, he plans to sort through thousands of tons of trash by hand to find the tiny drive.

Finding a 10-centimeter hard drive buried somewhere in 15,000 metric tons of waste perfectly fits the saying: “like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

Can a heart withstand such agony?

However, the city administration believes that the plan is practically impossible, reminding everyone that a large portion of the waste accumulated over the past 15 years has been buried underground.

Moreover, if Howells’ plan were to be approved, the city would need to find a new landfill site, something that doesn’t sit well with city officials.

There are also already existing plans to transform the current landfill into a solar energy farm.

Therefore, unless Howells manages to gain public support and convince the authorities, he won’t be allowed to search for the hard drive.

Still, this incident has already gone down in history as one of the greatest tragedies in the world of cryptocurrency.