A true story: The man who lost 7,500 bitcoins because of a hard drive!
James Howells from Wales was one of the early miners of Bitcoin in 2009 when mining was easily done through laptops.
During that time, he managed to mine:
7,500 BTC
As his interest in the field dwindled, he dismantled his setup and kept two hard drives, one containing important data... and the other useless.
By mistake, he threw away the wrong drive — the one that had his wallet!
That drive was disposed of in a large landfill in his town, and with the increase in Bitcoin's value over the following years, the value of his lost wallet became:
Over 250 million dollars at its market peak.
Since that day, James has been trying — for 10 years — to convince the municipality to allow him to dig in the landfill and search for the hard drive, even offering to pay millions for the chance to find it… but his request was denied for environmental reasons.
To this day, it is considered one of the strangest and most difficult true stories in the world of cryptocurrencies:
Millions of wealth… lost in a garbage bag
