The reflection of bitcoins on a computer’s hard drive.
Thomas Trutschel | Photothek via Getty Images
LONDON – A Briton who accidentally threw away a hard drive containing a bitcoin treasure is again asking local authorities to let him look for it in a landfill.
James Howells, a 35-year-old IT engineer from Newport, Wales, says he discarded the device while cleaning his home in 2013. He claims he had two identical laptop hard drives and that he mistakenly saved what contained the cryptographic ” private key “required to access and spend your bitcoins.
After all these years, Howells is still confident that he will be able to recover bitcoin. Although the outer part of the hard drive may be damaged and rusted, he believes that the internal glass plate may still be intact.
“There is a good chance that the dish inside the unit is still intact,” he told CNBC. “Data recovery specialists can rebuild the drive or read the data directly from the plate.”
Howells says he had 7,500 bitcoins that, at today’s prices, would be worth more than $ 280 million. He says the only way to regain access to him would be through the hard drive he threw in the trash eight years ago.
But he needs permission from the local council to search a garbage dump he believes contains the lost hardware. The landfill is not open to the public and the invasion would be considered a crime.
He offered to donate 25% of the value – worth about $ 70.8 million – to a “Covid Relief Fund” for his hometown, if he can dig up the hard drive. He also promised to finance the excavation project with the support of an unidentified hedge fund.
But Newport City Council has so far rejected its requests to examine the landfill, citing funding and environmental concerns. And it doesn’t look like the local authorities are going to change anytime soon.
“As far as I know, they already rejected the offer,” said Howells. “Even without having heard our action plan or having the chance to present our mitigations to concerns about the environment, it is just a no-no at all times.”
A council spokesman told CNBC that he had been “contacted several times since 2013 about the possibility of retrieving a piece of IT hardware that allegedly contained bitcoins”, the first being “several months” after Howells realized the drive had disappeared .
“The council has told Mr. Howells on several occasions that excavation is not possible under our licensing license and that the excavation itself would have a major environmental impact on the surrounding area,” said the council’s spokesman.
“The cost of excavating the landfill, storing and treating the waste can amount to millions of pounds – with no guarantee of finding it or still functioning.”
It is not difficult to imagine why Howells would want to rescue the equipment. Bitcoin prices have skyrocketed in the past few months, reaching a historic high near $ 42,000 last week, before dropping dramatically.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that a programmer in San Francisco had access to 7,002 bitcoins – worth about $ 267.8 million today – because he forgot the password needed to unlock a small hard drive containing the private key for a digital wallet.
The Bitcoin network is decentralized, which means that it is not controlled by a single individual, but by a computer network. Each transaction originates 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.