Man is looking for 167 million euros in Bitcoins in garbage dump
Man who threw away a hard drive with 7,500 Bitcoins in 2013 is looking for 11 million euros to dig up the disk.
Everyone’s nightmare. For fun, you leave your laptop whirring day and night to mine Bitcoins. Then you sell that laptop and throw the hard drives in a drawer. During the major spring cleaning, you think to yourself, I’ll just throw those hard drives away. And then you think to yourself: shit, that was my Bitcoins.
It happened to James Howell. He harvested plenty of Bitcoins with his laptop in 2009 when you could still calculate them with a home-garden-and-kitchen laptop. Now you need a complete data center for that, but in the early days you could just do that at home.
7,500 pieces
He collected about 7,500 pieces. With the current exchange rate still good for about 167 million euros. Not bad. When he had collected 7,500 of them, his girlfriend was tired of that whirring laptop. The laptop has been gone for a long time now. He kept the hard drive in a drawer, until he threw it in the trash in 2013 too.
stupid. James realized that too. In any case, the best man from Wales gained world fame with it. Especially when the Bitcoin price continued to rise. James also has a hard time letting go. That’s why he now comes up with a master plan to dig up the hard drive from the garbage dump.
treasure digging
The problem is that the Newport municipality where the best man lives has banned him from digging in the garbage dump for almost ten years. According to the municipal council, excavating the garbage dump is too expensive and too harmful to the environment.
Howell is not discouraged and has now developed an 11 million euro plan to get permission to go treasure digging.
Feasibility
Just get started. Over the past ten years, 110,000 tons of waste have been dumped on top of the disc. However, former IT employee Howell is convinced it is possible. Anyway, he has 167 million reasons to believe in success. Incidentally, the Bitcoins themselves are not on the disk, but the key to his crypto wallet is.
He explains his plan to Business Insider. A combination of human sorters, robotic dogs and an artificial intelligence-powered machine designed to find hard drives on a conveyor belt.
To be on the safe side, he has worked out two different versions of his plan. It depends a bit on whether and what he eventually gets permission for from the municipality.
Cost: 11 million
The most comprehensive option takes three years and costs around 11 million euros to implement. The other option is a bit more limited and probably has a slightly lower chance of success. That option lasts “only” 18 months and will cost 6 million euros.
The 36-year-old treasure hunter will present his plan to the municipality in the coming weeks and hopes to get permission. In any case, he has already put together a team of experts to help him in the search. We keep our fingers crossed for him. For permission, but also for finding his needle in the haystack.
