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| James Howells Says Technology Could Easily Find Bitcoin Hard Drives (image source: REUTERS) |
James Howells, a resident of Wales, is preparing to find one of his hard drives that was dumped in a rubbish dump in 2013, which he says contained around £150m worth of bitcoins.
They are now said to have secured funding to excavate the rubbish dump in Newport in search of the missing disc.
Howells told a UCRU News correspondent: 'The funding has been secured. We have brought in an expert in artificial intelligence. With the help of their technology, the hard drive can be easily found.
Howells, 37, an IT professional, claims that he started mining Bitcoin in 2009 when the price of Bitcoin was around $130. At that time they bought thousands of bitcoins.
He says the bitcoins stored on the hard disk could be worth around £150 million.
He told The Telegraph newspaper in 2017: 'During a mid-2013 cleanup, the hard drive, worth several hundred thousand pounds, was accidentally thrown out and placed in a normal bin at my local rubbish tip. was thrown after which she was buried in the rubbish.'
Howells has made several requests to Newport City Council. He also offered to pay the council for help in locating the hard drive in a specific area.
However, the local authority refused to allow them to search the hard drive, citing environmental concerns.
The authority further said that the project would cost crores and there was no guarantee that the drive would be found or even operational again.
A spokesman for Newport City Council said last year: 'The council told Howells on a number of occasions that it was not possible to dig under our licensing permit and to dig on our own would have too many environmental impacts on the surrounding area.'
Howells says that if he finds the hard drive, he will give a tenth of the proceeds to the city to turn it into a cryptocurrency hub.
They also say that they now have the funds for a useful and effective method of digging up the rubbish.
Howells has reportedly assembled a team of eight experts who specialize in tasks such as waste management, data recovery, artificial intelligence-assisted search operations and garbage excavation.
He also tried to hire a consultant who had worked for the company that obtained data from the black box of the doomed space shuttle Columbia, reports the online US media company Insider.
However, there is no guarantee that the hard drive is still inside the trash and the data on the drive may not be in a condition that can be recovered.
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