A Hard Drive Contains 7.500 Bitcoins Was Wasted In 2013, Now James Howells Digs A Garbage Dump

James Howells Search hard drive containing 7,500 Bitcoins in trash (Wired)

JAKARTA – James Howells hasn't given up looking for a hard drive containing 7.500 Bitcoins that he threw away in 2013. The 35-year-old engineer plans to search the city's landfill for 12 months.

The man from Newport, England has published his plan in The Sun newspaper. Howells will use x-ray scanning devices and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to find hard drives containing thousands of today's most expensive cryptocurrencies.

"We have a system with multiple conveyor belts, an x-ray scanning device and an AI scanning device that will be trained to recognize items that are similar in size and density to a hard drive", Howells said.

“It's going to be a tricky search because we don't want to damage the hard drive in the process—you can't just use a scraper”, he explains.

He also added that his party had discussed with relevant excavation experts and engineers to ensure the search process was carried out in the right way and safe for the environment around the landfill.

"We've spoken to the right excavation experts and engineers to make sure everything is done right and in an environmentally safe way", he said.

It doesn't stop there, Howells has also discussed with the best data recovery experts in the world how to recover his Bitcoins from the hard drive.

"(We) have spoken to some of the best data recovery experts in the world to make sure we can get it off the hard drive".

According to Bitcoin.com News, the search mission cost a lot of money, but Howells admitted that he received financial support from a wealthy foundation owner who was willing to cover the costs of the search and the equipment to find a hard drive containing 7.500 BTC.

The hard drive is estimated to be at a depth of 15 meters based on aerial photos of the landfill site.

“We estimate that there is between 300.000 – 400.000 tonnes of waste to be inspected”, said the tech engineer.

However, Newport City Council did not allow Howells to search the landfill despite being offered a £55 million offer.

“The cost of digging a landfill, storing and treating the waste can run into the millions of pounds – with no guarantee of finding it or still functioning properly”.

The City Council also said that "excavation is not possible under our license and the excavation itself will have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area".

If compared to the current price of Bitcoin, the 7.500 BTC is worth about 246 million dollars, or the equivalent of IDR 3.6 trillion, as reported by Bitcoin.com Markets.