LONDON – A Briton who threw a hard drive containing a treasure trove of bitcoins is back urging local city officials to let him look for it in a landfill.
James Howells, a 35-year-old computer engineer from Newport, Wales, said he threw away the device when he cleaned his house in 2013, claims he had two computer hard drives the same, and mistakenly placed the one containing the “cryptographic” key needed and spending his bitcoins in the trash.
After all those years, Howells is still convinced that he can use bitcoins. Although the outer component of the hard drive is broken and rusty, it believes that the internal tray would possibly still be intact.
“There’s a smart chance that the internal tray on the disk is still intact,” he told CNBC. “Data recovery experts can rebuild the reader or read the knowledge of the tray. “
Howells said he had 7,500 bitcoins that, at today’s prices, were worth more than $280 million and that the way to recover them would be to use the hard drive he threw away eight years ago.
But he wants permission from his local council to look for a sale that he says includes lost equipment. The landfill is not open to the public and illegal entry would be an illegal crime.
Howells came forward to donate 25% of the transport, valued at about $70. 8 million, to a “Covid Aid Fund” for his hometown if he manages to dig up the hard drive. He also promised to fund the excavation allocation with an unsigned hedge fund. .
But Newport City Council has rejected its requests to seek landfill, raising environmental and investment concerns, and local officials do not appear to be about to move soon.
“As far as I know, they’ve already turned down the offer,” Howells said. “Without even listening to our action plan or having the ability to provide our mitigations to your environmental concerns, it’s just a ‘no’ every single time. . “
A spokesperson for the board told CNBC that he had been “contacted several times since 2013 about the recovery of a PC device believed to involve bitcoins,” the first being “several months” after Howells first learned that the unit had disappeared.
“The council has told Mr. Howells several times that the excavation is not imaginable under our licensing permit and that the excavation itself would have a massive environmental effect on the surrounding area,” the council spokesman said.
“The charge for dumping, garageing and waste disposal can be millions of pounds, with no guarantee of locating it or it is still in operation. “
It’s not hard to believe why Howells would need the device back: Bitcoin costs have soared in recent months, peaking at nearly $42,000 last week before falling dramatically.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that a San Francisco programmer blocked 7,002 bitcoins, valued at about $267. 8 million today, because it forgot the password needed to unlock a small hard drive containing the personal key in a virtual wallet.
The Bitcoin network is decentralized, which means it is controlled through a single person but through a network of computers. Each transaction comes from a wallet that has a “private key”. It is a virtual signature and provides mathematical evidence that the transaction comes from the wallet owner.
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