The reflection of bitcoins on a computer’s hard drive.
Thomas Trutschel | Photothek via Getty Images
LONDON – A British man who accidentally disposed of a hard drive containing a wealth of bitcoin is once again urging local city officials to have him search for it in a landfill.
James Howells, a 35-year-old IT engineer from Newport, Wales, says he discarded the device when he cleaned up his house in 2013. He claims he had two identical laptop hard drives and that he accidentally left the drive with the cryptographic disk discarded. private key ‘is required to access and spend his bitcoins.
After all these years, Howells is still confident that he could get the bitcoin back. Although the external part of the hard drive may be damaged and corroded, he believes the glass shell on the inside may still be intact.
“Chances are that the plateau in the disk is still intact,” he told CNBC. “Data recovery experts can then rebuild the disk or read the data directly from the disk.”
Howells says he had 7,500 bitcoins that would be worth more than $ 280 million at current prices. He says the only way to access it again is through the hard drive he threw in the trash eight years ago.
But he needs permission from his city council to search a garbage dump that he says contains the lost hardware. The landfill is not open to the public and entering the site would be a criminal offense.
He has offered to donate 25% of the catch – worth about $ 70.8 million – to a “Covid Relief Fund” for his hometown if he manages to dig up the hard drive. He has also pledged to fund the excavation project with the support of an undisclosed hedge fund.
But Newport City Council has so far rejected its requests to look through the landfill, citing environmental and funding concerns. And it doesn’t look like local officials are moving away anytime soon.
“As far as I know, they’ve already declined the offer,” Howells said. “Without even having heard our plan of action or having had the opportunity to present our mitigating measures for their environmental concerns, it’s a straight no every time.”
A board spokesperson told CNBC that “there have been a number of contacts since 2013 regarding the possibility of retrieving a piece of IT hardware that is said to contain bitcoins,” the first was “several months” after Howells. first realized that the disk had disappeared. .
“The city council has told Mr. Howells a number of times that excavation is not possible under our permit permit and that excavation itself would have a huge impact on the environment in the area,” said the council spokesman.
“The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste can be as much as millions of pounds – without any assurance that it will be found or that it is still in good working order.”
It’s not hard to imagine why Howells would want to save the equipment. Bitcoin prices have skyrocketed in recent months, hitting a record high of nearly USD 42,000 last week, before pulling back sharply.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that a programmer in San Francisco lost access to 7,002 bitcoins – worth about $ 267.8 million today – because he forgot the password needed to open a small hard drive with a digital’s private key. wallet.
Bitcoin’s network is decentralized, which means that it is not run by one person, but by a network of computers. Every transaction comes from a wallet that has a “private key”. This is a digital signature and provides mathematical proof that the transaction is from the owner of the wallet.