A man lost a whopping $4.8 million after throwing away a specific computer part in the ‘biggest mistake he's ever made’.
The unlucky man shared how he unwittingly threw away a hard drive from his computer that is now worth millions of dollars.
Campbell Simpson, who is the editor of Gizmodo Australia, revealed that he got rid of the hard drive in 2010 before realizing that it contained something that would later become very valuable.
Inside the hardware was 1400 Bitcoins, which at the time only cost around $25.
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Simpson explained: “At the start of 2010, Bitcoin trading wasn’t even really a thing. It was hard to find anywhere that would accept BTC.
“I used the hard drive for a whole bunch of things. Storing pirated music and movies and TV series, a portfolio of my best tech writing work, all my uni assignments, photos of friends and family and the couple of holidays that I’d taken.
“I didn’t need, or care about, anything on it. So I threw it away.”
However, unfortunately for Simpson, the value of Bitcoin started to rise and has since skyrocketed.
Now, his 1400 Bitcoins would be worth around $4.8 million.
Simpson continued: “This is probably one of the stupidest things, in hindsight, that I’ve ever done. And I’ve done a lot of stupid things a lot of times.”
Despite this, he isn’t planning to go looking for the lost cryptocurrency, saying: “I’m generally pretty easygoing in life, I think, and I can laugh about it for like 95% of the time, but also, man. Man. What if.
“I could have bought a house. In Sydney. At Sydney prices. I could have moved around the world or bought a goddamn yacht or something.”
Simpson isn’t the only one who has lost out after parting ways with their Bitcoin too soon and one man in Wales is even attempting to buy a landfill where his Bitcoin was thrown away in a bid to find it.
James Howells, who is a computer expert, has been fighting for 10 years to recover the fortune, now worth around $630 million, that he thinks he lost in a council dump in south Wales, UK.
Howells lost his Bitcoin fortune when he put the hard drive into a black bag while cleaning his office and left it in the hallway of his home back in 2013. His then-partner mistook it for trash and disposed of it.
Speaking to the Guardian, he said: “It [the council] claimed at the high court that closing the landfill to allow me to search would have a huge detrimental impact on the people of Newport, whilst at the same time they were planning to close the landfill anyway.
“I expected it would be closed in the coming years because it’s 80/90% full – but didn’t expect its closure so soon. If Newport city council would be willing, I would potentially be interested in purchasing the landfill site ‘as is’ and have discussed this option with investment partners and it is something that is very much on the table.”