James Howells, a computer engineer, is known in the cryptocurrency world for having unfortunately thrown his hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoins into a landfill. Lost in 2013, the man has since tried to find the trace of the storage device. More than 7 years later, he decided to call in NASA and data recovery experts to help him with the task.
Since Bitcoin exploded, registering a record peak of $ 69,000 in November 2021, there have been countless unfortunate stories of minors having lost their Wallet password or their hard drive containing a small fortune. James Howells, a computer engineer, is one of his unlucky ones.
Its history is well known in the cryptocurrency world. In 2013, he held no less than 7,500 Bitcoins on a hard drive that he had undermined it himself with his PC. At the time, BTC was still in its infancy and its price was nowhere near as high. During a spring cleaning, he accidentally throws away the precious hard drive, which according to him is now in a Newport landfill, in South Wales.
The town hall remains silent on the claims of James Howells
For 7 years now, James Howells tries unsuccessfully to obtain permission from the municipality to thoroughly search the landfill. All in the hope of getting our hands on the storage device. The arguments of the computer scientist were not enough to convince the town hall, while he nevertheless promises to bequeath to them a quarter of the fortune recovered. It must be said that its content is worth today the trifle of $ 454 million.
And at a time when many analysts assure that Bitcoin could exceed $ 100,000 in 2022, the value of the hard drive could easily reach the $ 800-900 million. “It could be that the hard drive is worth a billion dollars and to do nothing would be proof of incompetence of the city council ”, he assures in the columns of the British site Metro.
He asks NASA engineers to help him
In his quest to find the device, James Howells enlisted the services of data recovery specialists and engineers from NASA, who notably worked on the Colombia shuttle disaster. “They were able to retrieve data from an exploded shuttle and they don’t seem to think looking in a landfill will be a problem ”, he explains.
With this team, the engineer hopes to be able to bend the municipality. Only, she is worried about having to bear the excavation costs, especially if the research does not lead to anything. On this point, the engineer ensures to cover all expenses. “I’m asking them for a three month feasibility study so that we can sit down and lay out our plans and they can voice their concerns and we can address them, but they don’t want to give me that ”, he laments.
According to James Howells, the operations should last between 9 and 12 months and they would be assisted by specially developed AI technology. After studying the aerial photographs of the landfill, the engineer estimates that the hard drive is in an area of 200 m2, to which must be added 15 meters of depth.
Source: Metro UK
