James Howells' life changed when he threw out a hard drive about the size of an iPhone 6. Howells had two identical laptop hard drives squirreled away in a drawer in 2013. One was blank; he says the other contained 8,000 bitcoins — now worth about $181m, even after the recent crypto crash. He'd meant to throw out the blank one, but instead the drive containing the cryptocurrency ended up going to the local dump in a garbage bag. Now, he is hoping local authorities will let him stage a high-tech treasure hunt for the buried bitcoins. His problem is that he can't get into the dump.
"We're trying to achieve this project to a full commercial standard," Howells said.