IT worker James Howells got rid of the unit, which had a 7,500-bitcoin digital store, between June and August 2013. He had originally mined the virtual currency four years earlier, when it had little value.
But when the cryptocurrency increased its value and he went to look for it, he discovered that he had mistakenly thrown away the hard drive with the garbage.
Now, with the loss of bitcoins that had skyrocketed even further, Howells has gone to Newport City Hall in Wales to ask permission to dig a specific section of the landfill where he believes the hard drive ended. .
In return, he has offered to pay the city council a quarter of the current value of the treasure, which he says could be distributed to local residents.
The digital currency was created in 2009 by an anonymous computer programmer or a group of programmers known as Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoins are essentially computer files that are stored in a “digital wallet” of the device. They can then be used as payment, recording all transactions in a public list known as a blockchain.
The price of bitcoin reached an all-time high in recent days and is now trading at around $ 37,000.
Howells first discovered that the hard drive was missing when his bitcoin was worth about $ 9 million. According to current rates, it is estimated to be worth about $ 273 million.
He told CNN: “I offered to donate 25% or £ 52.5 million ($ 71.7 million) to the city of Newport in order to distribute it to all local residents living in Newport in case of find and retrieve bitcoins “.
“That would mean about £ 175 ($ 239) per person for the whole city (316,000 people). Unfortunately, they turned down the offer and won’t even have any face-to-face discussion with me on the subject.”
After discovering the error, Howells went to the dump to see where the hard drive might have ended up. He told CNN at the time, “As soon as I saw the site, I thought you had no chance. The covered area is huge.”
Still, he now believes he knows how to get it back.
“The plan would be to excavate a specific area of the landfill based on a network reference system and recover the hard drive following all safety and environmental standards,” he told CNN on Friday. “The drive would then be presented to data recovery specialists who can rebuild the drive from scratch with new pieces and try to recover the small piece of data I need to access bitcoins.”
“The value of the hard drive is over 200 million pounds (about $ 273 million) and I’m happy to share some of that with the people of Newport in case I get a chance to look for it. 50% would be for investors who put the capital to finance the project, and I would be left with the remaining 25%, “he added.
A Newport City Council spokeswoman told CNN that the local government authority had “contacted several times since 2013 about the possibility of recovering computer hardware that was said to contain bitcoins.”
In a statement sent to CNN, the spokeswoman said the council had not rejected the offer, but was not allowed to excavate the site.
She said: “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 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.”