A man who says he threw away a hard drive loaded with 7,500 bitcoins in 2013 is offering his city $70 million to dig it up from the dump

• A man from the Welsh city of Newport has offered his city council a 25% cut of his 7,500 bitcoins if it allows him to excavate the landfill where he threw away a hard drive containing the fortune in 2013.
• The fortune — assuming it can be recovered intact — is worth about $275 million.
• The Newport City Council told CNN it was not allowed to excavate the site, warning of the environmental impact, "without any guarantee of either finding it or it still being in working order."
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In 2013, a British IT worker named James Howells threw away a hard drive with a digital wallet containing what was then a little-known, virtually worthless cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin.

Fast-forward, and at the time of writing a single bitcoin is trading at about $37,000. That means the 7,500 bitcoins contained on the hard drive would be worth in the region of $275 million.

Now, the Newport, Wales, local has offered his city council a vast sum of money if it allows him to excavate a landfill site where he believes the hard drive has been disposed of.

"I offered to donate 25% or £52.5 million" — $71.7 million — "to the city of Newport in order to distribute to all local residents who live in Newport should I find and recover the bitcoins," Howells told CNN.

Citing a population for the greater Newport area of about 300,000, Howells said that would mean about £175, or $240, a person.

"Unfortunately," he said, "they refused the offer and won't even have a face-to-face discussion with me on the matter."

Howells had mined the bitcoins over four years when cryptocurrencies were still in their infancy and worth very little. Howells recalled throwing the hard drive away between June and August 2013, believing he'd already backed up the files he needed from it.

He first realized his mistake, he told BBC News, when the price of a single bitcoin spiked to $1,000 from $150 that same year.

After visiting the landfill, Howells told the BBC he thought he had "no chance" of retrieving his hard drive. But he now has a new plan to find it.

"The plan would be to dig a specific area of the landfill based on a grid reference system and recover the hard drive whilst adhering to all safety and environmental standards," Howells told CNN on Friday.

"The drive would then be presented to data-recovery specialists who can rebuild the drive from scratch with new parts and attempt to recover the tiny piece of data that I need in order to access the bitcoins."

He added that if the plan were successful, about a quarter of the fortune would go to the city of Newport, roughly half would go to investors who funded the retrieval, and the rest would go to him.

In a statement to CNN, however, a Newport City Council spokeswoman said the city was not allowed to excavate the site.

"The council has told Mr. Howells on a number of occasions that excavation is not possible under our licensing permit and excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area," she said.

"The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds — without any guarantee of either finding it or it still being in working order."

Howells is, at least, not alone in his misfortune: The New York Times reported on Tuesday that bitcoins in lost wallets accounted for about 20% of the existing 18.5 million bitcoins — worth a total of $140 billion.

Wallet Recovery Services, a firm that helps recover lost digital keys, told The Times that it received 70 requests a day from users trying to access their digital wallets — a number that is three times what it was a month ago.