The Sun
AN IT worker who lost £275 million Bitcoin after binning his hard drive has offered £55 million to his local council to search a landfill – but they have repeatedly refused.
James Howells, 35, has planned a 12-month search of a 200-metre area of a rubbish dump in Newport, Wales using X-ray scanning devices and specialist AI technology.
James accidentally chucked the hard drive containing the Bitcoin fortune when he was cleaning out his office in 2013.
He has contacted engineers, environmentalists and data recovery experts from around the world in his bid to carry out the year-long specialist search.
But stubborn council chiefs won’t entertain the idea or allow him to meet with officials to outline his plans – no matter how much money he promises them, James said.
“If they would listen to me and hear me out they would know there’s no risk to the council,” he told The Sun Online.
“All I want is to put my case to the decision makers and if they still say no then so be it but they won’t even do that.
“In January I offered them £55 million but at the moment they are saying ‘no’ no matter how much money is involved.”
Newport Council said James had made repeated requests for help since 2014 – but it was “unable” to help him.
James said he has studied aerial photographs of the site and believes the hard drive is in a 200-metre squared area and could be 15 metres deep.
His high-tech plans to find the fortune has been backed by a super-rich hedge fund willing to stump up for the cost of the search as well as the equipment involved in exchange for the lion’s share of his fortune.
“Since I made the offer in January the value of bitcoin has gone up and down – if we were to recover the hard drive today it would be worth £275 million,” he said.
“This would be a proper search – not just somebody going in with a bucket and spade.
“We have a system with multiple conveyer-belts, X-ray scanning devices and an AI scanning device that would be trained to recognise items that are a similar size and density to the hard drive.”
He added: “This would be a delicate search because we wouldn’t want to damage the hard drive in the process – you can’t just use a claw grabber.
“We’ve spoken to excavation experts and proper engineers to make sure it was all being done correctly as well as in a way that was safe for the environment.
“For the past four or five months I’ve also been talking to some of the best data recovery experts in the world to make sure we can get it off the hard drive.”
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