A needle in a haystack? Quite literally!
After a decade-long battle with the government, the man is now offering to buy the entire mountain of waste to look for his hard drive from the hay. But why? Well, the hard drive contains the key to a $700 million Bitcoin and the man can go to any lengths to find it back before he gives up.
In 2013, James Howells, a computer science analyst, had ‘accidentally’ thrown away his hard drive containing a million dollars-worth Bitcoin key. As soon as he realized his grave mistake, he started attempting to get it back and hasn’t stopped ever since. Previously, he had offered the Newport City Council to fully fund the excavation process of the landfill and even share 25% of the recovered Bitcoin. But the judge announced that the claim had ‘no reasonable grounds’, turning down Howells’ proposal. Now that the man has come to know that his ‘lost’ Bitcoin wallet is worth $760 million, he wants to leave no stone unturned in his search.
Howells has been in a decades-long battle with Newport City Council to gain access to the landfill in Great Britain so he can look for his ‘discarded’ Bitcoin. The landfill contains around 15,000 metric tons of waste and his 12-year-old hard drive may be buried under 25,000 cubic meters of waste and Earth. However, Howells is now begging and pleading with the local officials as he offers to even clear out the trash and convert the site into a park so it could be a win-win. He wonders why he is not getting access as it serves dual purposes – the landfill gets cleaned as he digs for his hard drive. The city is, however, planning to close the landfill permanently, and this justifies Howells’ desperation.
The British IT worker had mined in the late 2000s when cryptocurrency was in its infancy. As a hobbyist, he had mined over 7,500 Bitcoins back in 2009. He had backed up his old gaming computer on a hard drive but to his misfortune, the device was home to his Bitcoin stash. Unlucky as he could get, this hard drive contained the only copy of the 51-character private key with which he could access his Bitcoin wallets. When Howells was cleaning out his office over a decade ago, he accidentally discarded the device with a pile of trash and the rest is history.
Despite all his attempts, Newport City Council feels that his chances of recovering the 12-year-old wallet are quite slim, Nonetheless, Howells is desperate to look for his needle through the haystack, quite literally, because the needle values at around $700 million! Now bigger question is, even if the officials allow him for his plan, would there be anything recoverable on the hard drive after laying underneath tons of trash for 12 years?
