IT worker James Howells got rid of the station, which owned a 7,500-bit bitcoins digital store, from June to August. He had originally exploited the virtual currency four years earlier when it was of little value.
But when the cryptocurrency went up in value and he went looking for it, he discovered that he had thrown the hard drive wrong with the trash.
After his lost bitcoin rose even further, Howells approached the Newport City Council in Wales to ask permission to dig a specific section of the landfill where he believes the hard drive ended up.
In return, he offered to pay the council a quarter of the present value of the treasure, which he said could be distributed among locals.
The digital currency was created in 2009 by an anonymous computer programmer or group of programmers, known as Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoins are essentially computer files that are stored in a ‘digital wallet’ on your device. They can then be used as payment, and each transaction is recorded in a public list, known as blockchain.
The price of bitcoin has peaked in recent days and is now trading at around $ 37,000.
Howells first discovered that the hard drive was missing when its bitcoin was worth about $ 9 million. Based on current rates, he estimates it will 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 to distribute to all Newport residents if I could find the bitcoins and recycle. ‘
“It would cost about £ 175 ($ 239) per person for the whole city (316,000 inhabitants). Unfortunately they refused the offer and they would not even talk to me about it.”
After discovering the bug, Howells went to the garbage 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 area is huge.”
However, he now believes he knows how to pick it up.
“The plan is to dig a specific area of the landfill based on a network reference system and repair the hard drive while complying with all safety and environmental standards,” he told CNN on Friday. “The disk will then be offered to data recovery specialists who can rebuild the disk with new parts and try to recover the small piece of data I need to access the bitcoins.”
“The value of the hard drive is more than £ 200 million (about $ 273 million) and I would love to share it with the people of Newport if I had the opportunity to look for it. to fund the project, and I would leave the remaining 25%, ‘he added.
A Newport City Council spokesman told CNN that the local government had been contacted several times since 2013 about the possibility of retrieving a piece of IT hardware that allegedly contained bitcoins.
In a statement sent to CNN, the spokesman said the council did not reject the offer but may not excavate the site.
She said: ‘The council has on several occasions addressed Mr. Howells said that excavation is not possible under our license permit and that excavation will have a major environmental impact on the environment.
“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.”