Half a Billion in Bitcoin, Lost in the Dump

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Hat tip, the clickbait site Newser

Annals of Money
December 13, 2021 Issue

Half a Billion in Bitcoin, Lost in the Dump

For years, a Welshman who threw away the key to his cybercurrency stash has been fighting to excavate the local landfill.
By D. T. Max

December 6, 2021

If things had gone just a bit differently, James Howells might today be as rich as the Queen of England. The decisive moment, he now thinks, occurred one evening in August, 2013, when he was twenty-eight and at home with his family in Newport, a small city on the Welsh coast. Howells and his partner, Hafina, were raising three children, and family trips—like the one that they had taken to Disneyland Paris—were fun but exhausting. So he had made plans to treat himself to what he called a “lads’ vacation”: a trip with friends to a resort in Cyprus. Howells, an engineer who helped maintain emergency-response systems for various communities in Wales, often worked from home, and that night he decided to neaten up his office. As he recently recalled to me, “The thought process was: I’m going to be drinking every day. I don’t want to be on a hangover and cleaning this mess up when I get back.”

At around 10:30 p.m., Hafina peeked into Howells’s office. “She wanted to have a fag with me,” he remembers. “The office area, with the window open, was the smoking zone.” She chatted with Howells as he chose which items to discard. “I’m chucking this out, putting this back in—bunch of cables, bunch of paperwork, broken mouse.”

In a cluttered desk drawer, he found two small hard drives. One, he knew, was blank. The other held files from an old Dell gaming laptop, including e-mails, music that he’d downloaded, and duplicates of family photographs. He’d removed the drive a few years earlier, after he’d spilled lemonade on the computer’s keyboard. Howells grabbed the unwanted hard drive and threw it into a black garbage bag.

Later, when the couple slid into bed, Howells asked Hafina, who dropped off their kids at day care each morning, if she would mind taking the trash to the dump also. He remembers her declining, saying, “It’s not my fucking job—it’s your job.” Howells conceded the point. As his head hit the pillow, he recalls, he made a mental note to remove the hard drive from the bag. “I’m a systems engineer,” he said. “I’ve never thrown a hard drive in the bin. It’s just a bad idea.”

The next day, Hafina got up early and took the garbage to the landfill after all. Howells remembers waking upon her return, at around nine. “Ah, did you take the bag to the tip?” he asked. He told himself, “Oh, fuck—she’s chucked it,” but he was still groggy, and he soon fell back asleep.

{snip}

[viva la]

1. I get kind of vicariously upset whenever this guy's story comes up

There's such a COST for that momentary negilgence that we all experience. He kind of blames his wife, LOL.

[captain queeg]

2. Doesn't sound like he was too upset at the time.

I sure hope he’s not hanging that over her head. I kick myself sometimes, probably 6-7 yrs ago, maybe more I thought it would be a good idea to have a little Bitcoin. I don’t think anyone thought of it as an investment at the time. I sure didn’t. I figured it was for discreet transactions and as such would gain popularity. At that time in my city there were just a couple ATMs where you could buy it. Not over the internet. The hassle of making a special trip stopped me from actually doing it. But, I wanted to $50 worth, I have no idea how much that was worth then or now but lm sure I’d be rich if I’d done so, AND hung onto it. I’d say the odds would be pretty high I’d have misplaced passwords/codes or whatever. Im am terrible at that stuff and fortunately for most passwords you can go thru some questions and reset your password. I think if you lose your Bitcoin number you are just SOL, and that would be me.