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Plenty of people regret not buying Bitcoin before it exploded in value based on how much money they could have made. One man in the United Kingdom was very ahead of the curve, but he’s now angling to purchase a landfill during his ongoing quest to recover a hard drive containing $760 million worth of the cryptocurrency.
As of this writing, a single Bitcoin is worth around $95,000, which means the guy who spent 10,000 of them to buy a pizza in 2010 to mark the first purchase ever mediated by the digital currency spent what could have become $950,000,000 on what is theoretically the most expensive pie ever sold.
Of course, it was pretty hard to imagine the first cryptocurrency ever created would end up being worth what it is today when the first Bitcoin was minted more than 15 years ago, and there are more than a few early adopters who missed out on a fortune by using theirs on similarly short-sighted purchases or selling before it experienced a meteoric rise.
One of the biggest draws of Bitcoin is the security offered by the blockchain that makes it impossible to access a wallet containing them without the lengthy code used to unlock your stash. Many people opt to store that information on a hard drive or some other digital device—including James Howell, a computer engineer from Wales who had 8,000 of them in his possession as of the summer of 2013 (when they were worth around $1 million in total).
Unfortunately, he inadvertently threw out the drive containing his Bitcoin while cleaning out his office that year and has spent more than a decade attempting to convince local authorities to allow him to comb through the landfill in the city of Newport where he believes it ended up only to have his requests repeatedly denied despite offering a sizeable bounty.
According to the BBC, the story recently took another turn when the city announced its plans to close the landfill within the next two years to convert it into a solar farm, which would essentially mark the end of Howell’s quest to obtain the hard drive that currently holds a Bitcoin fortune worth approximately $760 million.
Now, he’s harnessing a new strategy in the hopes he’ll able to recover it by angling to purchase the land, saying:
“The council planning on closing the landfill so soon is quite a surprise, especially since it claimed at the High Court that closing the landfill to allow me to search would have a huge detrimental impact on the people of Newport, whilst at the same time they were planning to close the landfill anyway.
I would be potentially interested in purchasing the landfill site. I have discussed this option recently with investment partners and it is very much on the table.”
I wish him the best of luck.