A WELSH man has developed a multi-million dollar plan to recover a binned hard drive with 8,000 Bitcoin tokens stashed on it.
The hard drive was accidentally tossed in 2013 and its owner believes it is sitting beneath a mountain of trash in a landfill.
4
4
4
James Howells took to Bitcoin mining before it was popular.
He cobbled together a stash of thousands of tokens stored on a hard drive in 2009 – just a few months after the mysterious Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first coin.
Howells mistakenly threw out his golden hard drive in 2013, the year Bitcoin first topped $1,000 a token.
The value of the hard drive is constantly changing with the price of Bitcoin, but is worth around $168million based on the current price of the cryptocurrency.
Howells, 36, is a former IT worker who still relies on Bitcoin as his main source of income.
He hasn’t forgotten about his holy grail and has developed a 21st-century plan to scan the 110,000 tons of rubbish.
Human sorters would take to the site, sifting through trash in search of the drive, removing objects meant for recycling in the process.
Two robotic dogs produced by famed engineers at Boston Dynamics would work on security detail and scour the ground – Howells told Insider he would name one of the dogs Satoshi after Bitcoin’s elusive founder.
Most read in Tech
Consultants brought in from relevant sectors have their fingerprints on Howells’ plan.
Insider notes that one advisor was part of the team that recovered the black box from the doomed Columbia space shuttle.
But Howells won’t get the green light to excavate the landfill without the approval of the local government.
He’s pledged the city government 25% of the crypto if it’s found, but officials have been stiff towards the would-be multi-millionaire.
“His proposals pose significant ecological risk, which we cannot accept and indeed are prevented from considering by the terms of our permit,” a local official told Insider.
Howells said he has been hesitant to take the government to court in order to keep things civil but said he’s willing to do so if his plan is denied.
4
