On video: Power plant restarted to mine Bitcoin/Angular
Bitcoin treasure in the dump: A British computer expert named James Howles is working hard to recover a huge fortune that he apparently lost forever.
Back in the early days of Bitcoin, Howles mined 7,500 coins himself as a hobby, when Bitcoin was just a speculative plaything for technologists.
Howles explained that he stopped mining when his girlfriend complained about the noise from the laptop and the heat it was generating to mine those coins.
At first, after the computer became inactive, Howells kept the hard drive, but after several years, he disposed of it for good.
These days, Howles is filing a lawsuit against the City of Newport in an attempt to obtain permission to search a municipal waste site, where he believes the hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoins, which are now worth more than half a billion dollars, was dumped.
The digital currencies, as of today, are estimated to be worth over 525 million dollars, Howls, who predicts that the value of the coins will continue to increase until the end of the year.
Claims that he wants a chance to try and locate the lost coins.
Howls.
"They want me to go and forget about it, but how is that possible? Why should I give up?"/screenshot, screenshot
"Some experts think the price will reach $250,000 per coin by the end of the year," Howles told the Daily Mail.
"This will increase the value of my hard drive to £1.5 billion (approx. $1.9 billion).
The city might be happy to leave it in a waste site, but I'm not.
They want me to go and forget about it, but how is that possible?
Why would I give up?
All I want is a chance to get my property back."
The lawsuit is the culmination of an ongoing dispute between Howles and the City of Newport. In September 2023, Howles offered the city compensation worth 25% of the value of the lost bitcoins in exchange for a search warrant, but the city refused. This refusal, along with the unwillingness of the municipality to discuss the issue, led Hauls to sue her.
According to various reports, a group of hedge fund investors is supporting the lawsuit alongside Hauls. The investors are expected to receive a portion of the lost bitcoins if and when Hauls succeeds in locating them. In addition to funding the lawsuit, they raised Investors fund a team of experts to search and recover data.
Previously, the city of Newport rejected Howells' request to excavate the waste site, citing possible environmental damage. The city, which emphasizes its commitment to the residents of Newport, declined to comment on the issue.
Howells is not the only person experiencing the pain of financial loss That big. Just like him, there are similar stories, of people who rented or held a very large amount of Bitcoin coins, and in good faith, threw away or lost the private keys, which are the only way to access those coins.
These and other cases have inspired studies and evaluations, because Today, there are around 4 million lost bitcoins.
Those coins still exist and are in total circulation, but cannot be accessed.
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