What would you be willing to do for 90 million dollars (potentially more)? For James Howells the answer is "just about anything," including scouring a landfill searching for his long lost Bitcoins.
Worse than not buying Bitcoins when they were worth cents, is knowing that you had a few thousand Bitcoins and threw it away. James joined the Bitcoin wagon since the very beginning in 2009, having managed to generate 7500 bitcoins before suspending operations due to his girlfriend's complaints about the noise made by his mining rig. The hardware was eventually thrown into the trash, but the had drive with his Bitcoins was thrown in a drawer... until, three years later, it ended up being thrown into the trash as well.
In 2013, with the Bitcoin worth around $100, his Bitcoins were already starting to weigh in on his conscience, as it was now worth 750 thousand dollars. But things were about to heat up as, by the end of the year, Bitcoins shot up to $1000, meaning he had trashed over 7 million dollars. And if you think that's bad, keep in mind that Bitcoins are now approaching $12,000 (each) which put his mistake into the 90 million dollars region
A value that has made James Howells seriously consider the possibility of trying to track the whereabouts of his hard drive and dig through the landfill it might have end up in.
Regrettably, in addition to the difficulty of tracking the trash and finding the disk among tons and tons of garbage, the chances that the disk will contain recoverable information after half a decade under these conditions is pretty slim. But ... maybe that's the only way to settle with your own conscience as, if it bothers you now, try to imagine how you'd feel if Bitcoin kept climbing to $100k, $500k or even more? By then we'd be talking about a "lost treasure" of about 4 billion dollars ... and I think it wouldn't be just him digging though a landfill to try and get his hands back on it! :)
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