According to reports, a landfill in the UK at the heart of a man’s battle to retrieve a misplaced hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoin is about to close.
A hard drive allegedly holding 8,000 Bitcoin is buried at a Welsh landfill about to close.
According to a February 9 BBC News article, the site near Newport, Wales, which lies east of Cardiff, the nation’s capital, is anticipated to close in the 2025–2026 fiscal year.
A Newport council spokesperson told the BBC, “The council is working on a planned closure and capping of the site over the next two years because the landfill has been in exploitation since the early 2000s and is coming to the end of its life.”
Planning clearance for a solar farm on a portion of the property was obtained by the council and approved in August.
The website might have a sizable Bitcoin.
According to local IT technician James Howells, a BTC $97,718 stockpile on a hard drive ended up at the tip after his ex-partner unintentionally disposed of it in 2013.
According to him, the drive held about 8,000 Bitcoin that he mined in 2009, presently valued at about $768 million.
Howells has been involved in a ten-year legal struggle with the Newport council, which he sued to either receive compensation for his loss or permission to dig around the landfill in an attempt to recover the drive and give it a portion of its contents if he did.
When a court dismissed the case in January, claiming that he had “no realistic prospect” of winning a full trial, he lost the fight.
He asserted that he had AI specialists and technology that would make locating the hard drive simple and cost neither the council nor the general public anything.
However, in October, the council declared that because of the “significant adverse environmental impact on the surrounding area,” excavation was not permitted under its environmental permission.
According to Web3 executive Al Leong, the 8,000 Bitcoins that were reportedly on the lost drive is only a tiny portion of the enormous cache of missing Bitcoin, which might account for up to 13% of the supply or almost 3 million coins.
Quantum computing will be possible to hack Bitcoin in “lost wallets” and put it back into circulation, according to Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino. However, several analysts caution that this would pressure Bitcoin to sell.