The man who lost his crypto fortune in a landfill wants to use robots to find it
Imagine you realize you accidentally threw a winning lottery ticket. You would probably dig through the trash, and if the jackpot was high enough, you could even play around with visiting your local landfill. This has been a reality for a British man named James Howells for the past decade, only instead of a lottery ticket, he’s looking for a hard drive containing the keys to millions of dollars worth of bitcoin. His latest plan to find his buried treasure involves robot dogs, because of course it does.
Today, mining bitcoin is a complex, energy-intensive process because the proof-of-work calculations become more difficult over time. But a decade ago, Howells was able to mine about 8,000 bitcoins on a modest home computer before the crypto boom. Even after the recent collapse in cryptocurrency prices, Howell’s lost fortune is worth around $166 million. All he needs to claim the money is the password stored on the hard drive he mistakenly threw away in 2013.
Howells – a former IT worker and current crypto trader – has been working on schemes to find his fortune ever since he realized the mistake. The problem, the local landfill in Newport, Wales has since been sealed and covered with soil. According to an interview Business Insider conducted with Howells, he has drawn up a plan costing $11 million to excavate the landfill. He has reportedly received funding from venture capitalists Hanspeter Jaberg and Karl Wendeborn, but he needs some robots to get the job done.
The plan calls for several Boston Dynamics Spot robots, which will march around the landfill in search of the hard drive. Garbage excavated from the landfill will be sorted at a nearby pop-up facility using human workers and AI systems. Even if Howells could find the hard drive in a mountain of junk, there’s no guarantee it will still work. If the data cannot be saved, his bitcoins are still lost. And let’s not forget that this hard drive has been sitting in a damp pit for the past decade. Waste water is not good for hard drives (or anything, for that matter).
The elements aren’t the only thing standing between Howells and his fortune. The local city council has always been skeptical of Howells and his plans. They weren’t interested in his offer to share 25 percent of the recovered crypto, noting that digging up the landfill could cost local governments millions, and there are real ecological concerns when opening a landfill near residential areas. Howells apparently hopes his new plan will change the council’s mind, but that seems unlikely after all these years. However, the Howells have not ruled out filing a lawsuit to secure the rights to rummage around in a large pile of trash. There are probably easier ways to make $166 million.
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