Bitcoin ($BTC) – Meet a man on a mission to find around $180 million in bitcoin buried in a landfill
James Howells, who lives in Newport, South Wales, claims to have accidentally dropped his 8000 hard drive. Bitcoin BTC/USD in 2013 while cleaning his office. About a decade later, Howells is determined to do whatever it takes to get the hardware back.
What happened: In 2013, Howells decided to do some housecleaning, a decision he would regret a few years later. Howells had two identical hard drives in his drawer; one was empty and the other contained 8,000 Bitcoin equivalent to around $180 million at the time of writing, which he had mined in the early stages of the Bitcoin bubble.
While cleaning out some trash, he accidentally threw out the hard drive that contained Bitcoin instead of the empty one. Howells believes his hard drive is buried in a rubbish dump in Newport, South Wales.
Citing environmental concerns, the city council has refused the 37-year-old’s request to collect his hard drive several times, but Howells has not let this deter his mission. Howells secured $11 million in venture capital funding to launch a high-tech scheme to recover the lost hardware.
Searching for a small piece of hardware buried under thousands of tons of trash can look like one of those Tom Cruise Mission Impossible scenes; However, with the help of human sorters, robot dogs from Boston Dynamics, along with artificial intelligence (AI)-powered machines trained to identify hard drives on a conveyor belt, Howells believes his plan is achievable.
His mission has two versions depending on the amount of trash the city council will allow him to dig up. According to Howells, the most expensive method will take an estimated three years and will involve searching around 110,000 tons of trash, costing him $11 million. The second version would take about 18 months at a cost of $6 million.
Howells has a team of eight experts, including an AI specialist, data recovery consultants, a waste management consultant and a consultant who previously worked for a data recovery company that helped recover data from the Columbia space shuttle disaster black box.
If his plan succeeds, he has promised to give 10% of the recovered capital to the city to establish the city as a crypto mining hub and to launch social impact programs in the city.
“We have a whole list of incentives of good things we want to do for the community,” Howells told the BBC. “One of the things we want to do at the landfill itself, once we’ve cleaned up and reclaimed that land, is put a power generation facility, maybe a couple of wind turbines.”
Despite the promised incentives, the city remains reluctant to give him the go-ahead, saying the search would pose a serious ecological risk to the community.
Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency in the world by market capitalization. The blockchain network originally developed for Bitcoin has disrupted key financial and healthcare sectors and has also given birth to platforms such as the Fetch.ai Network for the development of decentralized applications (dApps).
Photo by Tom Fisk from Pexels
