This sort of thing happens more often than you'd expect... unless you've kept up with the crypto world, in which case this sort of thing happens exactly as often as you'd expect.
From CNN:
A British man who accidentally threw a hard drive loaded with bitcoin into the trash has offered the local authority where he lives more than $70 million if it allows him to excavate a landfill site.
IT worker James Howells got rid of the drive, which held a digital store of 7,500 bitcoins, between June and August in 2013. He had originally mined the virtual currency four years earlier when it was of little value.
But when the cryptocurrency shot up in value and he went in search of it, he discovered that he had mistakenly thrown the hard drive out with the trash.
Now, with his lost bitcoin having soared even further, Howells has approached Newport City Council in Wales to ask for permission to dig a specific section of the landfill site where he believes the hard drive ended up.
...
"The value of the hard drive is over £200m (around $273 million) and I'm happy to share a portion of that with the people of Newport should I be given the opportunity to search for it. Approximately 50% would be for investors who put up the capital to fund the project, and I would be left with the remaining 25%," he added.
Of course the city, realizing the vanishingly small likelihood of finding and retrieving data from a hard drive thrown away almost seven years ago, has chosen not to approve this, but hope is not yet lost for Howells. Fortunately for him, the kind of people who would invest millions in a bitcoin scheme seldom have a really strong grasp of the concept of expected value.
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