A Welsh computer scientist offered a city council across the country a hefty reward for finding a hard drive, which he accidentally threw away in 2013, with 210 million pounds ($ 285 million) worth of bitcoins, British media reported on Friday.
According to James Howells, 35, the hard drive from his old laptop, which he said he accidentally dropped in the summer of 2013, is in a landfill in Newport, South Wales.
But local authorities do not allow digging at the site, claiming that it would go against the rules and harm the environment.
“The attitude of the council does not make sense,” the computer scientist told The Guardian newspaper, offering 25% of the value of the bitcoins if the hard drive is found.
According to the BBC, the hard drive contained 7,500 bitcoins, bought for next to nothing in 2009, but whose price exceeded $ 38,000 per unit on Friday.
Howells explained that he had mistakenly thrown the hard drive, identical to one he owned, while cleaning his office.
He estimates that today it can continue to work: “The outer case may be rusty. But there is a good chance that the internal disk, where the data is stored, still works,” he told The Guardian.
The city of Newport, which acknowledges having been contacted several times since 2014 about the matter, argues that the cost of the search could be “millions of pounds, with no guarantee that it will be found or will continue to work.”
“The council has also told Howells on several occasions that our permit does not authorize us to excavate at the site and that this would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area. So we have made it clear that we cannot help him in this case.” a spokeswoman.
Howells claimed to have found financial investors willing to cover the cost of the search in exchange for a portion of the proceeds.
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