When the price of bitcoin hit $10,000 on Wednesday, many in the cryptocurrency customs celebrated the milestone. But for one homo in Wales, bitcoin’s boom has a taken on a very different significance.

James Howells, 32, made headlines in 2013 after it emerged he had accidentally thrown away a figurer hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoins, worth around $4 million at the time. The hard drive now sits buried beneath trash in a landfill site about his domicile in Newport, Wales.

Following bitcoin’s recent price surge, the contents of the IT specialist’south missing hard drive are now worth $108 million at the time of writing, if other cryptocurrencies on the difficult drive are likewise taken into account.

“I’m ever aware of the bitcoin price,” Howells told
Newsweek. “I always knew this [the price rise] was going to happen…. In my opinion, bitcoin hasn’t had its Facebook moment all the same. Imagine the cost when information technology does. That would make my hard drive worth $1 billion or more.”

james howell bitcoin hard drive
The value of Howells’s hard bulldoze is only under $108 million.
James Howell

Howells first mined the bitcoins—a process of using computing power to confirm bitcoin transactions on bitcoin’s public ledger, the blockchain, in guild to generate new units of the currency—on a Dell laptop in February 2009. The post-obit year, he disassembled the estimator into parts and stored the hard drive in a drawer at his home. It remained there until 2013, when he mistakenly threw it into a general waste bin at his local landfill site.

More than than iv years of trash have since been dumped on top of the difficult drive, meaning whatsoever salvage functioning would be both costly and time-consuming. Despite making several requests to the local quango, Howells has yet to be granted permission to look for the missing treasure.

“It’s a case of disarming the local authorities and environmental agencies to let me to search,” Howells said. “As long as the toll continues to rise, which due to the math involved I remember information technology will, then my chances get greater and greater, because at some bespeak the local council must give me a shot at searching considering it volition be valued so high.”

It is estimated that around two.78 meg bitcoins have been lost since the cryptocurrency was created in 2009. At today’s prices, that amounts to well-nigh $30 billion.

james howell bitcoin landfill trash
“I have skillful days and bad days,” says James Howells.
James Howell

If Howells e’er does retrieve the lost treasure, he says he would use the money to fund cryptocurrency commencement-ups, buy belongings and care for himself to a Lamborghini. He said he would offering the local council a “mesomorphic reward” for their assistance in the search.

Howells is still active in the bitcoin space but these days focuses on an alternative cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Cash, which has experienced stratospheric price rises similar to bitcoin.

bitcoin fortune trash landfill computer
James Howells’southward lost fortune would be worth more than $100 one thousand thousand at today’southward bitcoin prices.
George Frey/Getty Images

Despite casually misplacing a sum equivalent to the gross domestic product of a Pacific island nation, Howells said he remained “pretty Zen” most the whole matter. He said his greatest regret wasn’t that he accidentally threw out the hard drive; it’s that he stopped mining bitcoin in the cryptocurrency’s early days—a decision forced upon him by his girlfriend at the time, who didn’t similar the whirring dissonance of the computers.

“I was ane minor decision away from walking out of my business firm with $ten billion in my back pocket—that’s what I regret most, the fact I stopped mining when I knew how big this was going to be,” Howells said.

“I take good days and bad days, but overall I’thou expert…. Anyway, no point crying about information technology.”