It is the story of 2009. A British citizen named James Howells was working in IT field purchased 7500 Bitcoin. During the period, the Bitcoin was trading at around $130. Fortunately today the value of Bitcoin has touched $16,000 which is really an unexpected performance. According to this figure, today Howells should have become a millionaire. But unfortunately he has lost his hard drive in which all of his bitcoin was stored.
This is very unfortunate story which happened in 2013. Howells installed a bitcoin mining hardware to generate the coin. We know that while mining it becomes so noisy. That’s why, being annoyed Howells’s girl friend forced him end the mining process. After mining was discontinued, Howells threw away his hard drive that kept the information about his digital wallet key.
“After I had stopped mining, the laptop I had used was broken into parts and sold on eBay. However, I kept the hard drive in a drawer at home knowing it contained my Bitcoin private keys so that if Bitcoin did become valuable one day, I would still have the coins I had mined,” Howells told the Telegraph.
“In mid-2013 during a clear-out, the hard drive – then worth a few hundred thousand pounds – was mistakenly thrown out and put into a general waste bin at my local landfill site, after which it was buried on site.”
He told BBC Radio that he had completely forgotten about the hard disk that had digital wallet key because he was busy with relocation process. That’s why he couldn’t keep his attention on his hard disk.
He had stored the hard drive in his office and completely forgotten about it just because of relocation and involvement in family life. While removing his old IT tools in 2013, he threw away that hard disk by mistake as he thought he had transferred all the data from there. In this way, he lost his precious hard disk.