James Howells, the owner of a discarded hard drive with 7,500 Bitcoin (BTC), placed a new order to excavate a landfill and possibly recover the device.
In 2013, Howells accidentally dropped a hard drive containing 7,500 BTC while he was cleaning his house. The amount of BTC was raised from Howell's mining activity when it was still possible to use CPUs to mine Bitcoin.
Up to four million Bitcoins are gone forever
By November 2013, his hard drive Bitcoin holdings were already worth $ 6.5 million and Howell has been trying to get it back ever since.
Now, according to the Newport daily tabloid, the South Wales Argus, Howells has filed a new application for the right to excavate a landfill in the city.
Following successive rejections from Newport City Council, Howells has upped the ante, offering up to 25% of the value of the lost Bitcoin as a COVID-19 relief donation to the city. At Bitcoin's current price, the hard drive is nearly $ 290 million, meaning the city could make around $ 72 million if the drive is successfully recovered.
According to Howells, all you need is access to the dump logs to pinpoint the exact location of the hard drive grid for a facility-specific search. The IT engineer also revealed that the search team would create an airtight seal to prevent the release of poisonous gases from the landfill during excavation.
Cryptocurrency user recovers long-lost private keys to access $ 4 million in Bitcoin
Commenting on the possibility of being able to recover useful data from the hard drive, Howells commented:
“There is no guarantee that it [will continue to function] due to the environment that it has been in, but there are things that give me confidence. The outer casing could be rusted. But the inner disk, where the data is stored, there should be a good chance that it still works. I think there is still a chance. But the longer this goes on, the less likely that will happen. "
However, Newport city officials say the environmental risks associated with the excavation are significant given the likelihood that the exercise will not bear fruit. In case the data is unrecoverable, council officials say the city would have to pay the bill.
Meanwhile, Howells says he is willing to put funds into an escrow account to cover digging costs.
Bitcoiner Loses Nearly $ 100,000 in BTC Due to Wallet Transfer Error
Howells is one of the many Bitcoin holders who have lost access to their funds over the years. In 2012, Campbell Simpson, a former Gizmodo editor, also discarded a hard drive containing 1,400 BTC, which is now worth $ 53.6 million.
From the loss of private keys to the erroneous sending of BTC to other addresses, up to 20% of the current circulating supply can be lost forever. In fact, data from cryptocurrency analytics provider Chainalysis and on-chain aggregator Glassnode places the number of lost bitcoins at between 3 and 3.7 million "coins."![descarga.jfif]
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