Reflecting bitcoins on a computer hard drive.
Thomas Trutschel | Photothek through Getty Images
LONDON – A British man who accidentally threw a hard drive with a sum of bitcoin on it again urges local officials to let him look for it in a landfill.
James Howells, a 35-year-old IT engineer from Newport, Wales, says he dumped the device while cleaning his house in 2013. He claims he had two identical laptop hard drives and that he mistakenly banned the one containing the “private key cryptography” needed to access and spend their bitcoins.
After all these years, Howells is still confident that he will be able to recover bitcoin. Although the outside of the hard drive may be damaged and rusty, he believes the glass plate inside may still be intact.
“There is a good chance that the plateau inside the unit is still intact,” he told CNBC. “Data recovery experts could then rebuild the drive or read the data directly from the plateau.”
Howells says he had 7,500 bitcoins that, at today’s prices, would be worth over $ 280 million. He says the only way to regain access to it would be through the hard drive he dumped in the trash eight years ago.
But he needs the permission of his local council to look for a landfill that he thinks contains lost hardware. The landfill is not open to the public, and the violation would be considered a crime.
He offered to donate 25% of the transport – 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 the Newport City Council has so far rejected requests to look through the landfill, citing environmental and funding concerns. And it doesn’t look like local officials are about to move soon.
“As far as I know, they have already turned down the offer,” Howells said. “Without even hearing our action plan or being given the chance to present our mitigations to their environmental concerns, it’s just a reply, not every time.”
A board spokesman told CNBC that he had been “contacted several times since 2013 about the possibility of recovering a piece of IT hardware that is said to contain bitcoin,” the first being “a few months” after Howells he realized for the first time that the unit was gone. .
“The council has told Mr Howells several times that excavation is not possible under our licensing permit, and the excavation itself would have a huge impact on the environment in the surrounding area,” the council spokesman said.
“The cost of digging, storing and treating waste could reach millions of pounds – with no guarantee that it will be found or that it will still be in working order.”
It’s not hard to imagine why Howells would like to save the equipment. Bitcoin prices have risen in recent months, reaching a record high of nearly $ 42,000 last week before abruptly withdrawing.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that a San Francisco programmer was blocked from 7,002 bitcoins – worth about $ 267.8 million today – for forgetting the password needed to unlock a small hard drive containing a private key. digital wallet.
The Bitcoin network is decentralized, which means that it is not controlled by a single person, but by a computer network. Each transaction comes from a wallet that has a “private key”. This is a digital signature and provides mathematical proof that the transaction came from the wallet owner.