This man wants to dig 7,500 bitcoins in a landfill

There is a fortune in bitcoin in a British landfill. James Howells sure: his 7,500 bitcoins are here somewhere.

A few months ago, we already reported on the volatility surrounding Howells. The Briton has 7,500 Bitcoin, which is worth about $ 250 million .. Or rather: he It was This bitcoin in 2014. He is doing everything in his power to recover his assets, because the hard drive containing the private key is currently in the landfill. Now he is making frantic “high-tech” attempts to get his bitcoin back.

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lost bitcoin

Howells is an IT Engineer from Newport in the UK. He has a problem: a hard drive containing $255 million in bitcoin is in a local landfill. South Wales Argos I previously reported this particular story last year.

The 35-year-old said he accidentally threw it away. He thought the disc was empty, but nothing could be further from the truth. Howells now wants to find a piece of hardware.

However, the municipality did not honor the first man’s request. They wouldn’t let him into the landfill, so the 7,500 bitcoins were left in the landfill.

New master plan

Now he has new idea. Speaking to The Sun, Howells claimed he got support from a “super-rich hedge fund” that will pay for the research “in exchange for the lion’s share of his fortune”. He also offered the municipality $76 million if bitcoin was found.

Howells told the media:

“This is going to be challenging, not just like someone going in with a bucket and a shovel. We have a system with multiple conveyor belts, X-ray scanning equipment and an AI scanner that is trained to recognize items of similar size. It has a density like a hard disk.”

The Briton also does not intend to search the entire landfill site. He says he studied aerial photographs of the site and concluded that the hard drive is located in an area of ​​200 square meters that can be about 15 meters deep. But make no mistake, it is likely to be “between 300,000-400,000 tons of waste”.

The municipality is working against

The city council is still not impressed with Howell’s idea. According to them, the chance of success was so small that it would only cost money.

“Even if we can agree to his request, the question is who will bear the costs if the hard drive is not found. Or if it is damaged to such an extent that the data cannot be recovered. So we have made it clear that we cannot help him with this.”

However, Howells remained steadfast. He explained that he wanted to perform a “delicate task” where the hard drive could not be damaged.

“You can’t just use a claw. We talked to our mining experts and good engineers to make sure we can do all of this properly and in a safe way. Over the past four or five months, I’ve also spoken to some of the best data recovery experts in the world to make sure we can remove data from the disk. steel.”

The scanning device will cost about $688,000, while the extraction tool to “clean up any contamination” will cost about $138,000.

old plan

Howell has already suggested several ideas about the case, in January he actually wanted to give 25% of the value and donate it to the city’s Covid Relief Fund. This amount amounted to more than 70 million dollars at that time.

However, it is not quite as simple as it seems. Safety precautions should be taken when releasing unhealthy gases. Searching a landfill is also not the best job to do.

Howells is convinced he can still get his bitcoin back. Although he got rid of the hard drive years ago, he thinks he knows where it is now:

“The landfill used a simple system in 2013. When a normal container was full, it was sequenced, pulled into the open pit and buried, and given a reference number.

This means that if I can access the data from the dump, I can determine which week I dumped the hard drive. The serial number allows me to identify the container in which the hard drive is located. “

Be your own bank

We previously reported from a German who also had assets on a hard disk. He had 10 attempts to enter the correct password for his IronKey, otherwise the entire contents of the drive would be automatically encrypted.

It’s now eight wrong attempts and still can’t reach it $220 million in bitcoin. Now he is waiting for help from crypto experts who can help him.

It’s a warning to everyone who owns bitcoin: if you have your own bank, you also have responsibilities.

Think carefully about how you manage cryptocurrency and don’t think too much about it. Or consider the advice of security expert Jameson Loeb: store your bitcoins today as if they were worth 10 times their value.

Old computers, fishing rod or a broken drive محرك: There are plenty of examples of how things can go wrong. Read the previous article and learn from it. Happy hug!

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