The man who threw 200M $ in the trash

And how he plans to get it back

Stories of lost hard drives containing thousands of Bitcoin aren’t rare. In the early days, when one coin was worth a few pennies, people were careless with their holdings.

The new digital currency was a little experiment, an interesting new computer science project for engineers, anarchists, and cryptography experts worldwide.

Back then, very few had a strong conviction that Bitcoin would take off and attract the minds and capital it does today, so people weren’t too concerned with a few lost coins.

Most accepted their mistake over the years, at least publicly. After all, there’s nothing they can do but move on.

The guy in this story is an exception. He hasn’t given up; quite the contrary. He is on a mission to find his lost fortune, and there’s good reason to believe he can actually do it.

But let’s start at the beginning.

This is James Howells, a 35-year-old IT engineer from Newport, Wales.

He mistakenly put a hard drive with 7,500 bitcoin in the trash while clearing out his home in 2013. He had two identical hard drives in his possession. He’d meant to throw out the blank one, but instead, the drive containing the key to his Bitcoin stash ended up going to the local dump in a garbage bag.

“I kept the hard drive in a drawer in my office for three years without a second thought — totally forgot about bitcoin all together. I had been distracted by family life and moving house.

“Fast forward to 2013 which is when I had a clearout of my old IT equipment — I hadn’t used this drive for over three years, I believed I’d taken everything off it… so it got thrown in the bin.”

The search for his lost fortune started only a few months later. Luckily he knew where he had to look—the landfill site in south Wales.

“When I went to the tip the manager took me up to the current landfill site and when I saw it — it’s about the size of a football field — my first thought was ‘no chance’,”

“The manager explained that things that were sent to landfill three or four months ago could be three to five feet deep.

After assessing the situation, he realized that he had two problems:

First, the landfill is way too big to search alone. He needs a team and machinery to actually have a chance at finding the hard drive. But even then, there is no guarantee it’s in a good enough condition to retrieve the private key to his wallet.

It’s a high-risk — high-reward scenario.

So he came up with a plan

Last year James Howell developed an $11 million business proposal to dig through the 110,000 tons of trash on the site.

The plan involves:

• Eight different experts in artificial intelligence, excavation, waste management, and data extraction
• Boston Dynamics robotic dogs as security and CCTV cameras to scan the ground

Human pickers and artificial intelligence will sort the trash at a pop-up facility near the site.

According to James Howell, the funding for the enterprise will be provided by European venture capitalists and an unnamed hedge fund.

But he has another problem

The Newport city council has yet to approve of his undertaking. And it’s not looking good.

According to a council spokesperson, James Howell has contacted them several times since 2013. The first was just a few months after he realized he had lost his coins.

“The council has told Mr Howells on a number of occasions that excavation is not possible under our licencing permit and excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area,”

“The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds — without any guarantee of either finding it or it still being in working order.”

So far, the city council has rejected his proposal every time. James said he had already assumed to hear a “no” from them. But that wouldn’t be the end of the story. He said if they don’t approve of his new $11 million plan, he’ll take the government to court.

The chance of winning such a case is questionable but for $200 million it’s worth a shot.

What’s your take on the story? Should he accept his loss or keep on trying?

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