“He threw it unintentionally” .. a programmer has been trying for 8 years to recover “Bitcoin” worth 350 million dollars
For eight years, a British programmer desperately tried to recover the old hard drive containing the password for a digital wallet after it was dumped in a landfill.
He is now in talks with a company that helped NASA recover data from a blasting space shuttle.
James Howells, from South Wales, amassed bitcoin when it cost almost nothing and the cryptocurrency was only known in narrow tech circles.
He managed to accumulate around 7,500 bitcoins - now worth more than $350 million.
A private encryption key to access bitcoins was kept on a hard drive, which was accidentally dumped at the Docksway landfill near Newport, Wales, in 2013. The man thought his old computer contained nothing but trash.
Realizing the mistake that cost him a fortune, he tries to dig through the trash, but to no avail.
He estimated that his hard drive was located somewhere in an area of 200 square metres, up to 15 meters deep under all the trash, so much so that he offered the local council responsible for the site a quarter of any fortune he found.
Howells also set up a Bitcoin Recovery Fund, looking for any help in the treasure hunt.
It appears that a data recovery company previously hired by NASA is now eager to help Howells, according to British media reports.
Ontrack, the company from Minneapolis, was able to recover the hard drive from the wrecked space shuttle Columbia in 2003, although the device was found months later.
"They were able to retrieve it from an exploding shuttle, and they don't seem to think being in a landfill would be a problem," Howells told The Sun this week.
However, the man still does not have official permission to dig the mound, as the council fears that the expensive excavations will not produce results, and may have a "significant environmental impact on the surrounding area".
According to various empirical analyzes of the blockchain, where all bitcoin transactions are logged, billions of dollars worth of hoarded bitcoins have been lost forever over the years.
In 2018, blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis estimated that passwords for cryptocurrency wallets containing between 2.78 million and 3.79 million bitcoins would never be recovered.
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