Following the recent Bitcoin password fiasco, it appears that yet another poor soul is having a desperate time trying to get his rightfully owned Bitcoins back before the market price drops again.

According to the Guardian, computer engineer James Howells has offered $68 million (£50 million) to the Newport city council to retrieve a laptop hard drive and 7,500 bitcoins that were accidentally discarded in a landfill The search is underway.

If the hard drives found are in working condition, they are worth more than $286 million (£209 million). Therefore, it may come as no surprise to learn that this is not the first time Howell has appealed to Congress for help in the discovery. But this is the first time he has offered a 25% share for safe return.

Howell explained that he even had the backing of a hedge fund that would pay up front, but the Newport council flatly refused to search through the hard drives, even under the promise of such a large donation.

He told the Guardian that "if we could access the landfill records, we could determine the week the hard drives were dumped," and by identifying "the serial number of the trash can the hard drives were in," we could get to the grid reference where the hard drives would be.

Sounds easy, right? It's like a search-and-retrieve task in a video game.

Not so; buried under decaying waste for seven years, the drilling would cause massive environmental damage, releasing millions of tons of methane and CO2 into the atmosphere.

Unsurprisingly, the Newport City Council is not prepared to break many permit regulations in light of the possibility of hard drives being found and in working condition. Given that the cost would be more than Howells offered, the council made it clear that Howells was on its own.

Forget it. It's probably already corroded.