A Man Accidentally Threw Away A Hard Drive With $180 Million In Bitcoin On It And Now Has A Certifiably Insane Plan To Get It Back
Blockchain News — James Howells, a Bitcoiner that mistakenly threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoin units he mined back in 2009, has reportedly put up a highly specialised team to help dig up the landfill where the hard drive allegedly ended up.
Since he realised the mistake, Howells has been petitioning the Newport City Council to let him dig up the hard drive from the landfill that is estimated to contain around 110,000 tons of garbage. The plan to excavate the garbage is billed to be backed by as much as $11 million in venture capital funding.
The two investors that have promised the funds, including Hanspeter Jaberg and Karl Wendeborn, are not going to release it until Howells gets the City Council’s approval to dig up the site.
"It's obviously a needle in the haystack, and it's a very, very high-risk investment," said Jaberg, and Howells confirmed that he has not signed any deal with the backers that can make anything binding yet.
Besides himself, Howells will sift through the garbage with the help of human sorters, robot dogs, and an AI-powered scanner that looks like a conveyor belt. Data analysts will also be working with the team.
This story truly has it all: throwing away $184 million — or more than double that recently enough — those terrifying Boston Dynamics robot dogs and a man with a dream.
I'm now obsessed with James Howells, a man who somehow threw away a hard drive with 8,000 Bitcoin on it and is now apparently pitching his plan to get it back from a landfill using robot dogs. If there's anyone you want to trust with an $11 million investment and an infinitesimal chance of recouping that money, it's this guy.
You would think someone who spent however much time and energy it takes to mine that many Bitcoin — a process which still has yet to be adequately explained to me — would have that hard drive containing millions of dollars under lock and key, yet it's in the middle of a landfill somewhere. I don't know that I'd be able to go on.
Credit to James, though. You can't call him a quitter. All he needs is $11 million and some robot dogs and he's getting that hard drive back. Seems like a foolproof enough plan to me.
I guess this is at least a less terrifying use of the robots than attaching machine guns to them and setting them loose.
Best of luck to my guy James. This has the potential to be an all-time comeback story. I have my very sincere doubts it ends well, but the potential is there.