Nearly 8,000 bitcoins were thrown away as trash. The British guy suffered for 8 years. Now his wife is scattered

According to a British media report on December 15 local time, a guy in Newport, Wales, UK, accidentally lost a hard drive storing nearly 8,000 bitcoins (currently worth 340 million pounds) eight years ago, but still insisted on searching in the garbage dump. Finally, he decided to hire a data expert who had business dealings with NASA to help him find huge wealth.

According to the report, James Howells, a 36-year-old IT worker, was one of the first people who came into contact with Bitcoin. At that time, he had digged nearly 8,000 Bitcoins in just one week. Value, so he stored the mined bitcoins in a small hard drive, and then forgot when he turned his head.

It wasn't until one night in August 2013 that Howells found the hard drive again when he began to dispose of the unwanted items, but he completely forgot about the Bitcoin stored in it, and threw it into the garbage bag used to clean up the garbage. inside. When he woke up the next day, Howells suddenly remembered that there were nearly 8,000 bitcoins stored in the lost hard drive. When he was about to search for it, he was told by his girlfriend that the trash bag had been thrown into the trash can on the street. , And the garbage truck took the garbage away early in the morning.

When Howells’ inner pain was not so deep, but a few months later, a piece of news deeply irritated him: A 29-year-old Bitcoin holder in Norway bought a set of sales with 1,000 Bitcoins. A $400,000 apartment. Only then did Howells realize that one of his accidental actions made him miss the opportunity to become a millionaire. So he started a plan to find the hard drive and asked the Newport City Government for help, but the reply he got was "impossible."

A mayor of Newport said he would not consider the idea of turning over garbage dumps, and would not allow Howells to meet with government officials to outline his plans. He said: "The cost of digging, storing and disposing of rubbish can be as high as millions of pounds, and there is no guarantee that the hard drive can be found or that the hard drive can still be used normally. In addition, the excavation itself will have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area. We can't help him with things."

Although there was no help from the government, Howells did not intend to give up. In the past eight years, he thought of many ways, such as forming a treasure hunt team, looking for investor sponsorship, and even negotiating with the Newport city government to find the hard drive, and after getting the bitcoin back, he will give 25% of the share to the Newport city government. . When Howells frantically searched for the hard drive, he ignored his girlfriend and children, lost them, and finally lost interest in family, people and things around him.

At the beginning of this year, he also contacted engineers, environmentalists and data recovery experts from all over the world. Now his "Expert Alliance" includes data recovery companies that do business with NASA. The company believes that if Howells’ The hard drive has not been cracked, and there is an 80% to 90% chance that his huge Bitcoin wealth can be recovered. Howells was still confident that he had talked with data recovery experts, and they were able to recover the relevant data from the exploded space shuttle, and it was not a problem to recover the data in the hard disk of the junkyard.