I feel bad for James Howells, the man who lost a hard drive with the keys to retrieve his stack of 8,000 BTC.

But the truth is, these things happened a lot in the past, but hopefully they'll happen a bit less frequently in the past.

Howells, like so many other people, lost access to a large amount of Bitcoin back when BTC was worth almost nothing at all.

8,000 BTC is worth close to $1 billion now, but when he lost it, it was worth a few dollars, maybe less.

No one could've predicted this.

Different versions of the story have been provided, for example it's unclear whether he ditched the hard drive or his ex did, and it's unclear how and why he's convinced his hard drive is in this particular landfill.

Howells has done everything he could to retrieve the hard drive.

He came up with a million different plans to excavate the site but the Council always said no.

And honestly, do you blame them?

Imagine this, imagine you're running the local Council and a man shows up and says, "hey, so I need to take over the site, excavate, completely turn it upside down in the hope of finding a hard drive that is probably there, with almost $1 billion in it"

What would your reaction be?

Obviously Howells promised to 'restore' the landfill after he was done, and he promised a share of the BTC, but the plan is so full of holes it makes Swiss cheese look solid.

And the council said the only thing it could, really.

They said, "there's no realistic chance of success".

And now they're shutting the landfill down anyway.

I feel bad for the guy.

But there's nothing we can do, we can learn from his mistakes.

Be very careful where you store your keys. And don't lose them.