It’s enough to make you sick. A UK man named James Howells was cleaning house and decided to throw away an old hard drive he hadn’t used in years, figuring any files he needed were already transferred to his new laptop. The problem? The hard drive contained roughly 7,500 Bitcoins, valued today at somewhere around $8 million US, or about £4.9 million.
The father of two isn’t sweating the loss, but many around the world now want to help him find the hard drive, which is said to be in his local landfill.
One commenter on the South Wales Argus asked if a crowdfunding campaign to find the drive would be a smart play…
“Perhaps he should start a crowd funding website to help pay for the cost of finding and recovering the hard drive. People would then have the opportunity to become backers in a bizarre modern day treasure hunt. Let’s say it would cost £250,000 to get a team together to find it etc. Offer investors a 4 to 1 return IF the hard drive is found and the data can be recovered. Its high risk/high return for the backers and gives a reasonable prospect of recovering £3m for the owner that would otherwise be lost forever.”
One Indiegogo campaign has launched in an effort to soften the blow to Howells and his family, encouraging backers to donate to an effort to find the drive. The project creator Craig Walsh does not know Howells but felt compelled to help. The flexibly funded Indiegogo campaign has raised no money to date, but it just launched on Saturday. This may not be the last crowdfunding effort related to this story, which has now garnered press worldwide.
Note: due to no preexisting relationship between Walsh and Howells, the nature of the campaign and Indiegogo as a platform, backers should carefully perform due diligence and come to their own conclusions regarding whether the campaign is legit.
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