The quest to find $181 million in bitcoin buried in a dump
- zarasushmaa
- Aug 5, 2022
- 2 min read
James Howells is known as the man who accidentally threw away 8,000 bitcoins. Now he has an $11 million master plan to get them back.
Howells, from the city of Newport in southern Wales, had two identical laptop hard drives squirreled away in a drawer in 2013. One was blank; he says the other contained 8,000 bitcoins — now worth about $181 million, even after the recent crypto crash.
He'd meant to throw out the blank one, but instead the drive containing the cryptocurrency ended up going to the local dump in a garbage bag.
Nine years later, he's determined to get back his stash, which he mined in 2009.
Howells, 36, is hoping local authorities will let him stage a high-tech treasure hunt for the buried bitcoins. His problem is that he can't get into the dump.
For almost a decade, Newport's city council has denied his requests to dig for his hard drive, saying it would be expensive and environmentally damaging, but Howells is not deterred.
He gave Insider a first look at his new $11 million proposal — backed by venture-capital funding — to search up to 110,000 tons of garbage. He hopes presenting it to the council in the coming weeks will persuade it to let him finally try to recover the hard drive.
Finding a hard drive in 110,000 tons of garbage:
Looking for a hard drive among thousands of tons of garbage might seem like a Herculean task.
But Howells, a former IT worker, says he believes it's achievable through a combination of human sorters, robot dogs, and an artificial-intelligence-powered machine trained to look for hard drives on a conveyor belt.
His plan has two versions, based on how much of the landfill the council would allow him to search.
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