The reflection of bitcoins on a computer hard drive.
Thomas Trutschel | Photothek through Getty Images
LONDON – A Briton who accidentally threw a hard drive with a quantity of bitcoins again urges local officials to drop him off at a landfill.
James Howells, a 35-year-old computer engineer from Newport, Wales, says he discarded the device while cleaning his home in 2013. He claims he had two identical hard drives for laptops and erroneously banned what it contained. the cryptographic “.key private” needed to access and spend your bitcoins.
After all these years, Howells is still confident that he will be able to get bitcoin back. While the outside of the hard drive may be damaged and rusty, he believes the glass plate inside may be intact.
“There’s a good chance the dish inside the unit is still intact,” he told CNBC. “Data recovery experts could rebuild the drive or read it directly from disk.”
Howells says he had 7,500 bitcoins that, at current prices, would be worth more than $ 280 million. He says the only way to regain access to it would be through the hard drive he threw in the trash eight years ago.
But he needs permission from his city council to look for a dump that he believes contains lost hardware. The landfill is not open to the public and the offense would be considered a felony.
He has offered to donate 25% of the transportation, worth about $ 70.8 million, to a “Covid Relief Fund” for his hometown, if he manages to dig up the hard drive. It has also pledged to fund the excavation project with the support of an unnamed hedge fund.
But so far Newport City Council has rejected their requests to examine the landfill on environmental and funding concerns. And it doesn’t look like local officials are about to move soon.
“As far as I’m aware, they’ve already turned down the offer,” Howells said. “Without having heard our action plan or without having the opportunity to present our mitigations to their environmental concerns, it’s nothing more than once.”
A council spokesman told CNBC that it had been “contacted several times since 2013 about the possibility of recovering a piece of computer hardware that was said to contain bitcoins,” the first of which was “several months” after Howells left. realizing for the first time that the unit had disappeared. .
“The council has told Mr Howells on several occasions that excavation is not possible under our license permit and that the excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area,” the council spokesman said.
“The cost of unearthing the landfill, storing and treating the waste could reach millions of pounds, with no guarantee of finding it or that it was still in good condition.”
It’s not hard to imagine why Howells would want to save the team. Bitcoin prices have skyrocketed in recent months and hit an all-time high of about $ 42,000 last week before falling sharply.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that a San Francisco programmer had 7,002 bitcoins (worth about $ 267.8 million today) blocked because he forgot the password needed to unlock a small hard drive containing the key. deprived of a digital wallet.
The Bitcoin network is decentralized, that is, it is not controlled by a single individual, but by a network of computers. Each transaction comes from a wallet that has a “private key”. It is a digital signature and provides mathematical proof that the transaction has been owned by the portfolio owner.