British individual James Howells has urged the city council to 'unload' the landfill just to find his hard drive, which was removed in 2013.
The hard drive contains 7,500 Bitcoin and if estimated at current prices, BTC has reached $ 35,927 per unit, bringing its total savings to $ 269.4 million.
Howells also offered $ 71.7 million or 25% of its Bitcoin savings to hand over to 316,000 Newport residents. This means that each person will receive $ 239.
Unfortunately, the city council rejected the offer and did not want to discuss further on the issue.
According to a Newport City Council spokesman, landfills are not allowed to be re-excavated due to the environmental impact in the surrounding area including the cost of re-excavating, storing and treating waste.
Howells actually mined Bitcoin for four years. At that time the cryptocurrency had just been introduced and its value also did not reach two digits.
Believing to have backed up all the information stored from the hard drive, Howells finally removed the device around June and August 2013.
However, Howells is not the first individual to regret such an unfortunate fate. Former CTO Ripple Stefan Thomas reportedly had just two more IronKey login attempts before losing 7,002 BTC worth more than $ 260 million.
