Another year, another attempt of Howells to get back his lost Bitcoins. Last time I checked up on him he was trying to still access the dump site but kept getting denied by the city. But he now may have found a compromise the city just might accept; Send in remote controlled robot dogs to look for the hard drive. Apparently each robot dog aka "spot" model costs about 74.000 Euro each and he's apparently already secured two investors.

But even this might not get him the positive answer he hopes for from the local government, as the city insists the costs and environmental damage would exceed the value of his lost property. Not that it's solely about money, but the fact his Bitcoin is now 150 million Euros as appose to the almost half a billion Euros it was last year, I doubt his new proposal will be met with with a positive response: "He had even promised to give the city government 25% of the crypto revenue if they would just let him root around in the trash pile, but the council has said the cost of digging up the heap could run into the millions, not to mention the environmental impact for the surrounding area." But even if this latest plan gets rejected, Howells has a backup plan: sue the government. "the local government has barely given Howells the time of day over the past nine years, the former IT worker said he hopes the new proposal will give his idea legitimacy. If the council says no— again—Howells told reporters he’d take the government to court."

So, what's up with Monero? It's seriously outperforming Bitcoin and the other cryptos lately. This might have something to do with major update v15, or maybe it's the high demand for XMR on the dark web lately due weapons put for sale from the Ukraine war, no one really knows but IMO Monero is one of the best cryptos out there. I also like Tornado Cash, these two are my top privacy centered cryptos. I'm even staking the latter and am planning to leave there for the long run, so trading makes less sense than staking in this case. If you're also interested you can read up on the options here, just be sure to use your sound judgement and calculate the gas fees, estimated staking time, rewards (etc) beforehand. I once actually made a loss at Uni V3 when providing liquidity to the UNI/WETH the pool. After a few good months, the major price swing between ETH/UNI made it sit out of range for over two months and I eventually gave up, but due to the persistent high gas fees on Eth every time I checked, I eventually chose the lowest fee I saw after all the weeks of trying but overall still lost value. Not a disaster or anything, but it's just a pity if other traders or miners walked away with the rewards that could/would/should have been yours but now isn't due to miscalculating.