James Howells has 7500 bitcoin lost in the trash since 2013, when he accidentally threw away one of his hard drives thinking it was the one that was empty, since he had another hard drive exactly the same, the size of an iPhone, but only one of them. they contained the now lost bitcoin (BTC). Howells later realized that he had actually thrown away this last hard drive, the one containing the 7500 bitcoin he mined back in 2009.
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Today, these bitcoins would be worth approximately 165 million dollars, and that is why Howells does not stop in his efforts and has devised a complete plan to rescue his bitcoins by integrating robot dogs into his team, now that he has decided to recover his precious hard drive again. This plan proposes a scenario of digging through the trash that would last from 18 months to three years, all with the aim of recovering the lost bitcoins.
Since realising he had lost the hard drive containing the bitcoins, Howells has repeatedly asked Newport authorities in the US for permission to access the city's rubbish dump in order to search for the hard drive containing what he calls "his bitcoin treasure". All of his requests for permission have been denied for a decade, with the city authorities claiming that digging in the rubbish dump would be too costly and dangerous for the environment.
The owner of the missing bitcoins is still trying to get his money back, and he has new plans and projects in store. Last year, he offered $76 million to the city authorities to be able to search for his bitcoins in a XNUMX-square-meter area of the local garbage dump.
What's new now is that Howells has decided to integrate into his search team a really interesting combination of robot dogs, human classifiers and a special machine that works with artificial intelligence and has been specially trained to search for hard drives on a conveyor belt. In addition, he has just announced that he has two different plan options to find the lost bitcoins with his team of experts.
The two versions of Howells' plan to find the missing bitcoins
The two variants of Howells' plan depend on the area in which he will be able to search for his bitcoin. The first alternative of the plan is based on a large area. This quest is planned for a three-year time frame and involves cleaning up 100 metric tons or 110 tons of trash at a cost of $11 million.
The second option would involve a much smaller area, with costs of $6 million and a shorter time frame of just 18 months. The 36-year-old engineer hopes that one of the two phases will be approved after presenting them to the council in the coming weeks.
While searching for a hard drive among thousands of tons of trash may seem like an impossible task to complete successfully, it is worth noting that Howells has a team of eight experts to carry out his plan. His team includes an adviser who worked for a company that managed to recover data from the black box of the Columbia space shuttle that crashed in the US in 2017.
Now, even if Howells manages to successfully complete his plan to recover the lost hard drive, there is no guarantee that he will be able to extract his lost bitcoins because in order to do so, it is essential that he is in a good state if he wants to have any chance of recovering them.
