The man who dumped £150 million in bitcoin hopes AI and robot dogs will get it back | Bitcoin

A computer engineer who accidentally threw away a hard drive containing roughly £150 million worth of bitcoin plans to use artificial intelligence to search through thousands of tonnes of landfill.

James Howells discarded the hardware from an old laptop containing 8,000 bitcoins in 2013 during an office clean-out and now believes it is in a landfill in Newport, South Wales.

The council has previously refused the 37-year-old’s repeated requests to search the site on environmental grounds, but he has created a high-tech £10m scheme backed by hedge fund money to find the digital assets.

His new proposal would use AI technology to operate a mechanical arm that filters the trash, before it is then picked by hand at a pop-up facility near the landfill.

According to the plans, he will hire a number of environmental and data recovery experts, and while the search is in progress, hire robot dogs as security so that no one else can try to steal the elusive hard drive.

Howells said: “Digging up a landfill is a major operation in itself. The financing is secured. We have hired an AI specialist. Their technology can easily be retrained to search for a hard drive.

– We also have an environmental team on board. We basically have a well-rounded team of different experts, with different expertise, who, when we all come together, are able to carry out this task to a very high standard.”

Howells believes the search will take about nine to 12 months, but even if he gets permission from the council, there is no guarantee that the hunt will be successful or that the bitcoins he mined all those years ago will be recovered from the hard drive.

But if they are, he has promised to use the money to help the Newport community and invest in a number of cryptocurrency-based projects, such as a community-owned data mining facility.

Howells said: “We have a whole list of incentives, with good things we want to do for the community.

“One of the things we want to do on the landfill itself, once we’ve cleaned up and reclaimed that land, is put a power generation facility, maybe a couple of wind turbines.

“We want to set up a community-owned mining facility that uses the clean electricity to create bitcoin for the people of Newport.”

But the big problem Howells still has to overcome is getting permission from the council, which won’t meet him to discuss his plans or entertain his ideas.

A spokesperson for Newport City Council said: “We have statutory duties that we have to carry out to manage the landfill.

“Part of this is managing the ecological risk to the site and the wider area. Mr Howell’s proposal poses a significant ecological risk which we cannot accept, and in fact are prevented from assessing by the terms of our permit.”