[imagesource: Wales News Service]

It’s tough not to feel sorry for James Howells.

Back in 2009, he snuck in super early and amassed around 8 000 Bitcoin. At the time, the cryptocurrency was worth next to nothing, and he only stopped after his “girlfriend, fed up with the noise of block-mining hardware, made him”.

The British IT worker sold most of his equipment for scrap after he spilt lemonade on it, while the hard drive containing the key to his digital wallet sat in a drawer for more than three years.

Then, in a brainfart he would come to greatly regret, he accidentally threw it away, reports The Guardian:

Howells discarded the hardware from an old laptop in 2013 during an office clearout and now believes it is sitting in a rubbish dump in Newport, south Wales.

Today, a single Bitcoin is worth around R380 000. Multiply that by 8 000 and you get a figure hovering around the R3 billion mark.

Over the years, he has repeatedly appealed to the Newport city council for help in recovering the hard drive. He even went as far as to offer the council a 25% share if workers could locate it.

Time and time again, the council has denied his requests and cited environmental concerns as the chief reason. To counter this, Howell is now proposing a search involving a hi-tech scheme backed by hedge fund money from Germany and Switzerland.

All in all, the 36-year-old reckons the search will cost around £10 million and should take between nine and 12 months:

His new proposal would utilise AI technology to operate a mechanical arm that would filter the rubbish, before then being picked by hand at a pop-up facility near the landfill site.

Image: UIG via Getty Images

Under the plans he will hire a number of environmental and data recovery experts, and while the search is ongoing employ robot dogs as security so no one else can try to steal the elusive hard drive.

We’ve seen Boston Dynamics’ famous dancing robodog Spot pull off all sorts of moves. Security should be a walk in the park.

To allay council concerns, Howells says the retrieval project also has an environmental team on board.

I feel for the guy, I really do, but the council appears unlikely to budge. Below from The Telegraph:

A spokesperson for Newport City Council said: “Newport City Council has been contacted a number of times since 2014 about the possibility of retrieving a piece of IT hardware said to contain Bitcoins.”

…”Even if we were able to agree to his request, there is the question of who would meet the cost if the hard drive was not found or was damaged to such an extent that the data could not be recovered.”

“We have, therefore, been clear that we cannot assist him in this matter.”

Howells also offered to give 10% of the proceeds to turn Newport into a cryptocurrency hub, which would involve giving £50 worth of Bitcoin to every person in the city and installing crypto-based terminals in all shops.