A British computer scientist is willing to pay $ 70 million to the authorities where he resides to be allowed to
dig in a landfill and thus unearth a hard drive
full of bitcoins that he accidentally threw in the trash.
James Howells dumped the storage device between June and August 2013. He
had stored 7,500 units of the cryptocurrency
that had been acquired four years before losing them.
At that time bitcoin had very little value.
As the value of bitcoin skyrocketed, Howells went to look for the treasure he had stored and that was when he realized that he had accidentally thrown the hard drive.
Today,
the 7,500 units of bitcoin are valued at roughly $ 270 million
.
[The price of the cryptocurrency bitcoin surpasses $ 20,000 for the first time in history]
"I offered to donate 25% or 52.5 million pounds ($ 71.7 million) to the city of Newport to distribute to all local residents who live in Newport if I found and recovered the bitcoins," Howells told CNN.
"This would mean approximately 175 pounds
($ 239) for each of the 316,000 inhabitants
of the city. Unfortunately they rejected the offer and will not even have a face-to-face discussion with me on the matter," the IT expert explained.
The price of bitcoin hit an all-time high in recent days and is now trading around $ 37,000.
Howells went to the landfill when he realized what he had lost.
At the time he thought he had no chance of recovering it:
"The covered area is huge," he
said, but now he says he is sure of how to find the hard drive.
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"The plan to recover the hard drive would be to dig a specific area of the landfill based on a
grid reference system
, respecting all environmental and safety regulations," he told CNN on Friday.
"The disk would be given to data recovery specialists, who can rebuild the disk from scratch with new parts, in an effort to recover the small data space that I need to access the bitcoins," Howells said when he was willing to share the data. money with the people of Newport.
"Approximately 50% would go to investors who put the capital to finance the project, and I would keep the remaining 25%," he added.
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A spokeswoman for the city's mayor's office told CNN that
the local government had been "contacted several times since 2013
about the possibility of recovering a piece of computer hardware that is said to contain bitcoin."
He added that they had not rejected the offer, but was not allowed to excavate the site due to permitting issues.
In addition to that it would have a huge environmental impact, according to the same spokesman for the Newport mayor's office.
With information from
CNN.
