The Most Expensive Hard Drive in a Landfill

James Howells bought 7,500 bitcoins in 2009 for a few dollars. He stored them on a hard drive. Then, four years later, he threw that hard drive in the bin. Not metaphorically—physically, into a garbage bag, into a bin lorry, into a landfill in Newport, Wales, where it now sits beneath hundreds of thousands of tons of compacted rubbish, the wallet file intact, the coins untouched and worth something in the neighborhood of five million euros.

He didn’t realize what he’d done until the stories started coming out—the ones about people who’d bought early, held on through the volatility and the public ridicule, and woken up obscenely wealthy. That’s when the full weight of one lazy afternoon’s housekeeping landed on his chest. The arithmetic is genuinely brutal: he hadn’t lost the coins. He’d just buried them.

He went looking, naturally. Asked the local council for permission to excavate the site. They said no. So the drive is still out there, sealed inside a mountain of waste, perfectly inaccessible—a fortune in cryptographic keys decomposing next to old pizza boxes and broken furniture. What gets me isn’t the money, or even the irony. It’s that the data is almost certainly fine. The coins exist. They’re just buried.