A man who lost $176 million worth of bitcoin in a dump wants to use a pair of $75,000 robotic dogs in his master plan to get it back
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James Howells threw out a hard drive to a landfill in 2013 that contained 8,000 bitcoins.
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He has an $11 million business plan to excavate the station and recover the bitcoins.
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The plan includes budget for two robot dogs from Boston Dynamics.
James Howells, the man who made headlines after he lost 8,000 bitcoins on a hard drive that he accidentally threw away, has a master plan to get his cryptocurrency back.
Howells threw out the hard drive containing the bitcoins in 2013. It ended up in Howells’ local landfill in Newport, Wales.
In a new interview with Insider, Howells said he’s put together an $11 million business plan to recover the hard drive, whose value stands at about $176 million at the time of writing — although the value of bitcoin can fluctuate.
Howells told Insider that his plan budgets for two robotic “Spot” dogs from Boston Dynamics.
Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot first became commercially available in June 2020, when it hit the market for $74,500 per unit.
Since then, Spot has been used to conduct scans for construction projects, herd sheep and patrol parks in Singapore to enforce social distancing.
Howells told Insider that the robots would be used both for security as roaming CCTV cameras and to scan the ground to search for his missing hard drive.
He said the project would require two dogs so one could be on patrol while the other charges the battery.
Howells said that if the project goes ahead, he would like to name the robot dogs “Satoshi” and “Hal.”
Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym for the person or group of people who created Bitcoin, and Hal Finney was the first ever recipient of a bitcoin transaction.
Howells told Insider that he constructed his plan with the help of expert advisors and secured funding through two venture capitalists. He hopes it will help convince Newport City Council to allow him to dig the landfill.
The council has consistently refused Howell access to the landfill since 2013, and his chances still look slim.
A council spokesperson told Insider that there is “nothing that Mr. Howells could present to us” that would convince the council to allow him access to the site.
“His proposals pose a significant ecological risk, which we cannot accept and are in fact prevented from assessing by the terms of our permit,” they added.
Read the original article on Business Insider
