In 2013, James Howell's girlfriend accidentally threw away a hard drive. Of course he didn't know that this hard drive contained about 8.000 bitcoins.
So for the past decade Howell has been persistently asking the Newport City Council to begin excavating the landfill in hopes of recovering the disk that would today hold an estimated $647 million worth of cryptocurrency.
Now filed a lawsuit to the city council in an attempt to force them to let him excavate.
If the hard drive is recovered, which Howells believes is an 80 percent chance, the digital coins will also be recovered. If all goes well, he offers the city council 10% of the recovered Bitcoins: worth $65 million.
But the council, citing environmental concerns, has repeatedly (and for over a decade) rejected his proposal to dig through the rubbish.
The city council issued a statement saying:
“The council has told Mr Howells on a number of occasions that excavation is not possible under our environmental permit and that work of this nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area. The council is the only body authorized to carry out work on the site."