The ancient problem of the man who threw away £150m in bitcoin

James Howells has spent years trying to persuade Newport council to allow him to spend millions digging up a rubbish tip to find a computer hard-drive, possibly containing yet more millions, which he threw away in 2013.

The ancients, who found obdurate behaviour fascinating, often explored such human failings in their myths, many of which featured horribly appropriate outcomes. Erysichthon (‘one who pulls up the land’) provides a good example. Let the poet Ovid explain.

Erysichthon, a man who never sacrificed to any gods, hacked away at and pulled down a much-venerated oak tree, hung with votive offerings and sacred to Ceres, goddess of the grain that feeds the world; further, he both beheaded a man who tried to stop him and ignored the tree’s threats of punishment.

Ceres decided that such extreme profanation should be punished fittingly and sent a mountain nymph to instruct Hunger (the very antithesis of Ceres) to insinuate herself into Erysichthon’s body. Flinging both arms around him in his sleep, Hunger breathes deep into his veins.

Erysichthon at once starts dreaming of food, champing on nothing but empty air, wearing out tooth on tooth to no purpose. Awake, he finds his jaws and stomach at the mercy of his cravings. He orders all the food that earth, sea and air can provide, but with tables loaded, he complains of hunger, demanding feasts in the middle of feasts.

Like a raging fire made hungry by the abundance of supplies, burning more logs the more that are given, so he demands more even as he consumes banquets. All food is the cause of more food, and all eating does is to make him empty. By now he has consumed his family fortune but everything he has eaten merely adds to his fatal sickness. So ‘the miserable wretch began to tear at his own limbs with his broken teeth and feed himself by eating his own body’.

And Mr Howells? What suitably fitting end might the ancients have dreamt up for him? Condemned to spend eternity completely buried in bitcoin-rich hard drives and desperately searching for what he really needs – food?