The key to my £150m Bitcoin fortune is lost on council rubbish tip
...but they won’t let me hunt for it, says IT worker
IT must be the most expensive spillage in history.
After splashing lemonade on his laptop keyboard, IT worker James Howells dismantled it for parts before binning the hard drive by mistake.
Almost a decade on, the digital currency locked away on the device could be worth as much as £150million – so he has assembled a crack team including Nasa experts and robot dogs to try to retrieve it.
There’s only one snag in his £9million plan, leaving aside the challenge of rooting through all that rotting rubbish – the council won’t let him start digging.
Mr Howells, 37, has promised to convert the site near Newport, Gwent, into a crypto- currency hub where locals can ‘mine’ their own bitcoin if he succeeds, and the area’s 150,000 residents would be handed £50 worth of bitcoin each. Mr Howells would pocket about £100million.
But the council says the risk to the community from harmful chemicals potentially released by unsettling the landfill site means his offer must be rejected.
In 2009, Mr Howells used a program to generate what was then a little-known digital currency, eventually amassing 8,000 bitcoin. At the time, his stash was worth about £20 – but it later rocketed to £200million.
His hoard can be accessed only with ‘private key’, or digital code – the copy of which is on the hard drive he threw out after mistaking it for another device in 2013. Backed by venture capitalists who would take a slice of the proceeds, his extraction plan involves mechanical arms sifting through thousands of tons of waste.
Also on board are data recovery experts who worked with Nasa following the space shuttle Columbia disaster, which disintegrated as it re-entered the atmosphere in 2003.
In a further space-age twist, the plan envisages security in the form of two £50,000 robot dogs to patrol the area to ensure nobody else tries to find the drive, and assist the search by scanning the ground.
The four-legged robots, nicknamed Spot, were designed by US-based Boston Dynamics, and are already being used to guard sites such as the ruins of Pompeii. ‘Digging up a landfill is a huge operation in itself,’ Mr Howells said. ‘The funding has been secured. We’ve brought on an artificial intelligence specialist. We’ve also got an environmental team on board.
‘We’ve basically got a well-rounded team, which, when we all come together, are capable of completing this task to a very high standard.’
His story has captured the imagination of technology lovers around the world. Former Top Gear host Richard Hammond recently made a documentary about his search.
Having studied aerial photographs of the dump, Mr Howells believes the hard drive is in a 200m squared area and could be 15m deep.
Sifting all that rubbish could take a year, he says – but he puts the chances of success as high as 90 per cent.
But he says council chiefs won’t entertain the idea or even allow him to meet officials to outline his plans.
Bitcoins were first introduced in 2008 by a mysterious programmer known only as Satoshi Nakamoto. They do not physically exist and are not backed by any central bank, but they can be bought, sold and ‘mined’ – a process carried out by computers programmed to solve complicated mathematical problems.
Surging interest from speculators pushed the value up to a staggering £56,000 each last year, although that has subsequently plunged by two-thirds.
A spokesman for Newport City Council said: ‘Mr Howells’s proposals pose significant ecological risk which we are prevented from considering by the terms of our permit.’