This Man Lost 8,000 Bitcoins After Ditching His Hard Drive In 2013, Here's His Fate Today!
JAKARTA – James Howells lost 8,000 Bitcoin which is currently worth around 181 million US dollars (equivalent to Rp. 2.7 trillion). At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at IDR 327,198,538 per coin according to Coingecko data.
The 36-year-old is from Newport in South Wales, England. Howells regretted throwing away the hard drive containing 8,000 BTC. Now he's trying to get the hard drive back.
In 2013, Howells had two hard drives the size of an iPhone 6. He kept them both in a desk drawer. On one of the hard drives are stored 8,000 Bitcoin crypto currency, the result of mining he did in 2009.
At that time, he intended to throw away the empty hard drive but instead threw away the hard drive containing thousands of BTC. Eventually, the device containing the cryptocurrency ended up in a landfill.
Howells, 36, hopes local authorities will let him go on a hi-tech treasure hunt for buried bitcoins. The problem is that he can't get into the trash.
In recent years he has asked the Newport city council for permission to dig into the city's landfills for hard drives containing Bitcoin. However, the Newport city council rejected his request on the grounds that the search would be costly and damaging to the environment.
Nevertheless, Howells' stance was not shaken. He recently got an injection of funds to do the digging from a venture capital firm.
According to a report from SCMP, its new US$11 million proposal is backed by venture capital funding to source up to 110,000 tonnes of waste. He hopes presenting it to the board in the coming weeks will persuade him to let him try to find the wasted hard drive.
A number of attempts were made by Howells. The former IT worker stated that he would do the sorting of garbage that would be carried out by robot dogs and humans. The robot dog is an artificial intelligence (AI) robot that has been trained to search for hard drives.
Howells estimates excavation at the vast TPS will take three years and involve scouring 100,000 metric tons – or about 110,000 tons – of waste at a cost of US$11 million. While a search in a small polling station will cost 6 million US dollars and take up to 18 months.
He has assembled a team of eight experts including one adviser who works for a company that recovers data from the black box of the downed space shuttle Columbia.
“We are trying to achieve this project by full commercial standards,” Howells said.
Howells said the machine would dig up the trash, which would then be sorted at a nearby facility. Humans and AI machines from tech companies in Oregon will sort it out. The mechanical arm will then select any object it detects as a hard drive.
Furthermore, Howells said as long as the device is not cracked, there is an 80 to 90 percent chance of data being retrieved. On the other hand, it is not yet known whether the effort will end well or not.