The man who shelled out $175 million in bitcoin wants robot dogs to help dig it up

A man who accidentally dumped a hard drive with 8,000 bitcoins on it wants to use robot dogs and artificial intelligence to help him dig through a dump to recover his lost fortune, according to a report.

James Howells, from the southern Wales city of Newport, accidentally threw away the iPhone-sized drive in 2013. The bitcoin stored on it is now worth about $175 million.

Now Howells is fighting to get permission from Newport City Council to dig up the landfill and find the hard drive using a high-tech, multi-million dollar plan, Insider reported.

Howell’s master plan reportedly involves spending $11 million digging up the landfill and sorting through 110,000 pounds of trash. Both humans and AI-powered machines trained to recognize the hard drive will then sort through the junk in a process he expects will take three years.

A duo of Boston Dynamics robotic dogs, meanwhile, would also sort through trash during the day and patrol for treasure hunters at night, according to the report.

If Howells succeeds in finding the hard drive, there is still a good chance that he will be unable to recover his bitcoins due to damage to the hard drive. Nevertheless, he has recruited a data recovery team that includes an adviser who helped recover data from the black box of the space shuttle Columbia after it crashed, according to the report.

If Howells wins over the city council, his bold plan will be bankrolled by a pair of Swiss and German venture capitalists, Hanspeter Jaberg and Karl Wendeborn. The duo stands to earn more than $50 million if the bitcoins are recovered.

“It’s obviously a needle in the haystack, and it’s a very, very high-risk investment,” Jaberg told Insider.

In addition to paying his investors, Howells was reportedly going to keep about 30% of the Bitcoin, give 30% to workers who helped recover it and give about $60 in bitcoin to each resident of Newport.

But the city council told Insider it doesn’t approve of Howell’s plan, saying digging up the landfill poses “significant ecological risk.”

Still, Howells is still pushing, telling Insider he met with his local MP and is weighing legal arguments.

“We don’t want to harm the environment in any way,” he said. “If anything, we want to leave everything in better shape.”