
“It belonged to James Howells, who threw it out when he was clearing up his desk in mid-summer and discovered the part, rescued from a defunct Dell laptop. He found it in a drawer and put it in a bin. And then last Friday he realised that it held a digital wallet with 7,500 Bitcoins created for almost nothing in 2009 – and then worth about the same. ‘You know when you put something in the bin, and in your head, say to yourself ‘that’s a bad idea’? I really did have that,’ Howells, who works in IT, told the Guardian. At the time he obliviously threw them away, the 7,500 Bitcoins on the hard-drive were worth around £500,000.”
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site
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