James Howells is well-known for mistakenly discarding 8,000 bitcoins.
He currently has a $11 million grand scheme to get them back.
When James Howells discarded a hard drive the size of an iPhone 6, his life was forever altered.
In 2013, Howells, a resident of the southern Welsh city of Newport, had two identical laptop hard discs stashed away in a drawer.
One was blank, but the other, according to him, held 8,000 bitcoins, which are now worth $181 million.
He had intended to discard the blank one, but the drive carrying the Bitcoin wound up being taken to the nearby landfill in a waste bag.
He mined his cache in 2009, and nine years later, he’s still adamant about getting it back.
Howells, 36, is requesting permission from the local authorities to conduct a high-tech treasure hunt for the hidden bitcoins.
His access to the dump is his concern.
Howells has requested to dig for his hard drive for almost ten years, but Newport’s city council has consistently rejected him because they claim it would be costly and environmentally harmful. Nevertheless, Howells is unfazed.
He provided Insider with an early look at his new $11 million venture capital-funded proposal to search up to 110,000 tonnes of trash.
In the upcoming weeks, he expects to present it to the council in an effort to convince it to finally allow him to attempt to recover the hard drive.
A hard drive was discovered in 110,000 tonnes of trash.
It may seem impossible to find a hard drive among thousands of tonnes of trash.
Howells, a former IT professional, said he thinks it is possible with a combination of human sorters, robot dogs, and a system with artificial intelligence that is programmed to search for hard drives on a conveyor belt.
Depending on how much of the landfill the council would let him search, his idea had two different iterations.
According to his calculations, the most involved approach would cost $11 million and need three years to go through 100,000 metric tonnes, or nearly 110,000 tonnes, of trash.
A reduced version would take 18 months and cost $6 million.
He has put together a group of eight professionals, including one advisor who worked for a company that recovered data from the black box of the Columbia space shuttle, who have expertise in things like AI-powered sorting, landfill excavation, waste management, and data extraction.
The specialists and their businesses would be hired to carry out the excavation and would get a bonus if the bitcoin hoard could be found.
We’re trying to finish this project to a full commercial grade, Howells said.
Howells asserted that the garbage was sorted in a temporary facility near to the dump after it was dug up by machines.
He has put together a group of eight professionals, including one advisor who worked for a company that recovered data from the black box of the Columbia space shuttle, who have expertise in things like AI-powered sorting, landfill excavation, waste management, and data extraction.
The specialists and their businesses would be hired to carry out the excavation and would get a bonus if the bitcoin hoard could be found.
We’re trying to finish this project to a full commercial grade, Howells said.
Howells asserted that the garbage was sorted in a temporary facility near to the dump after it was dug up by machines.
If found, will the hard disc even function?
The “platter”—a disc composed of glass or metal that contains the data—determines whether the hard drive will function.
Howells claims that the chances of recovering the data are between 80% and 90%, provided the platter isn’t fractured.
These numbers are real, according to Phil Bridge, a data recovery expert who has assisted Howells on the project.
