Man who accidentally threw 7,500 Bitcoins on hard drive has new plan to get his BTC back

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The British man who accidentally threw away a computer with 7,500 bitcoins on his hard drive has devised a new plan to recover his lost coins in the city’s landfill. “We estimate that there are between 300,000 and 400,000 tonnes of waste to be examined,” he said.

A man on a mission to recover 7,500 lost Bitcoins

James Howells, a computer engineer who accidentally threw away an old computer’s hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoins in 2013, hasn’t given up on his quest to get his coins back. The 35-year-old from the town of Newport in the UK shared with The Sun publication his 12-month plan to search the town’s landfill using x-ray scanners and technology of AI.

Noting that “It would be a proper search – not just someone coming in with a bucket and spade,” the Briton claimed:

We have a system with multiple conveyor belts, x-ray scanning devices, and an AI scanning device that would be trained to recognize items similar in size and density to the hard drive.

“It would be a tricky search because we wouldn’t want to damage the hard drive in the process – you can’t just use a claw pliers,” he pointed out. “We spoke to knowledgeable excavation experts and engineers to make sure everything was done correctly and in a way that was safe for the environment.”

Howells added that over the past four or five months he has “been talking to some of the best data recovery experts in the world to make sure we can get it off the hard drive.”

The research will be expensive, but Howell said his plan is backed by a very wealthy hedge fund willing to cover the cost of the research and the equipment involved in exchange for the lion’s share of his fortune.

Howells believes his hard drive is in an area of ​​200 square meters and may have a depth of 15 meters based on aerial photographs of the site. The IT engineer said:

We estimate that there are between 300,000 and 400,000 tonnes of waste to be examined.

Despite having a plan, Howells said Newport City Council would not let him search the landfill, even after offering them £ 55million ($ 76million).

Newport City Council explained that “the cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into the millions of pounds – with no guarantee of finding it or keeping it running forever.” Further, the council stated that “excavation is not possible under our license permit and the excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area.”

At the time of writing, 7,500 bitcoins are worth around $ 246 million according to data from Bitcoin.com Markets.

Do you think James Howells will get his bitcoins back? Let us know in the comments section below.

Tags in this story ai, Bitcoin computer, bitcoin dump, bitcoin laptop, discarded bitcoin, computer, treadmill, Hard drive, James Howells, dump, lost bitcoin, x-ray

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