The reflection of bitcoins on a computer’s hard drive.
Thomas Trutschel | Photo Library via Getty Images
LONDON – A British man who accidentally threw out a hard drive with a zipper of bitcoin on it, again appeals to local city officials to have him searched at a landfill.
James Howells, a 35-year-old IT engineer from Newport, Wales, says he threw the device away while cleaning his home in 2013. He claims he has two identical chips for laptops and that he incorrectly contains the one that needs the cryptographic “private key” to access and spend his bitcoins.
After all these years, Howells is still confident that he will be able to recover the bitcoin. Although the external part of the hard drive may be damaged and rusted, he believes that the glass plate inside may still be intact.
“There’s a good chance the dish inside the disc is still intact,” he told CNBC. “Data recovery experts can then rebuild the drive or read the data directly from the dish.”
Howells says he had 7,500 bitcoins, which at today’s prices would be worth more than $ 280 million. 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 local council to look for a garbage dump that he says contains the lost hardware. The landfill is not open to the public and the offense is considered a criminal offense.
He offered to donate 25% of the trek – worth about $ 70.8 million – to a “Covid Relief Fund” for his hometown if he manages to dig up the hard drive. He also promised to fund the excavation project with the support of an unnamed hedge fund.
But Newport City Council has so far rejected its requests to look through the landfill, citing environmental and funding issues. And it does not look like local officials are going to move anytime soon.
“To the best of my knowledge, they have already turned down the offer,” Howells said. “Without ever having heard our plan of action or without being given the chance to worry about their mitigation of the environment, it’s a straight no every time.”
A spokesman for the council told CNBC that it had been contacted a number of times since 2013 about the possibility of retrieving a piece of IT hardware containing bitcoins. The first one is a few months after Howells first realized the ride was gone. .
“The council has on several occasions told Mr Howells that excavation is not possible under our license permit and that excavation will have a major environmental impact on the environment,” the council spokesman said.
“The cost of excavating, storing and treating the landfill could amount to millions of pounds – without any guarantee that it will be found or that it is still in working order.”
It’s not hard to imagine why Howells wants to store the equipment. Bitcoin prices have soared in the past few months and peaked at close to $ 42,000 last week before retreating sharply.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that a programmer in San Francisco was excluded from 7,002 bitcoins – which today is worth about $ 267.8 million – because he forgot the password needed for a small hard drive with the private key to unlock a digital wallet.
Bitcoin’s network is decentralized, which means that it is not controlled by one individual, but by a network of computers. Each transaction comes from a wallet with a ‘private key’. It is a digital signature and provides mathematical proof that the transaction came from the owner of the wallet.