Ali Hasan
No, I am not scamming you with a fake offer. It’s real. A man named James Howells, 35 is offering almost $60-75 million to retrieve his hard disk. The reason? It’s filled with bitcoins.
The story is as spectacular as it can get. James is an IT worker who began mining cryptocurrency in 2003 when it was almost worthless and he had almost 7,500 bitcoins on his PC by 2013. But one fine day he was clearing out his office and he accidently threw away the hard disk containing bitcoins along with a broken laptop and some old keyboards.
Earlier his bitcoins were worthless but now they might be around $250-300 million and he is offering a reward of 25% of his bitcoins to the officials of Newport City Council. He wants their permission to search its landfill site for the missing hard drive. He thinks that it would be enough to tempt officials into finally letting him dig for the device, but council chiefs insist they are bound by their licensing permit.
In an official statement, he said “There’s pot of gold for someone at the end of the rainbow – and that ends in the landfill site. I had two identical hard drives and I threw out the wrong one. I know I’m not the only person who has ever thrown out the wrong thing but it usually doesn’t cost people over £200 million.
I have to laugh about it now because what else can I do? There is going to be a point when the files on that machine are worth more than a billion pounds – the attitude of the council does not compute as it just does not make sense.” He somehow still believes that even after all this time the hard drive would still be in good enough working order to retrieve the bitcoin files.
He said, “There is no guarantee of that because of the environment it’s been in but there are things that give me confidence. The outside case might be rusted. But the inside disk, where the data is stored, there should be a good chance that it still works. I believe there still will be a chance. But the longer this drags on though it’s less likely to be a possibility.”
An official spokesperson 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. The first time was several months after Mr. Howells first realized the hardware was missing.
The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds – without any guarantee of either finding it or it still being in working order. The council has also told Mr. Howells on a number of occasions that excavation is not possible under our licensing permit and excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area.
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.”
Although, he now has a plan that would be to dig a specific area of the landfill based on a grid reference system and recover the hard drive whilst adhering to all safety and environmental standards. The drive would then be presented to data recovery specialists who can rebuild the drive from scratch with new parts and attempt to recover the tiny piece of data that I need in order to access the Bitcoins.
Howells is, at least, not alone in his misfortune. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Bitcoins in lost wallets account for around 20% of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoins – worth a total of $140 billion. We just heard a similar incident a few days ago where one man has almost the same amount stuck in a digital key locker as he forgot the password and has only 2 attempts left. After which the coins will be locked forever and can never be recovered.
Wallet Recovery Services, a firm that helps recover lost digital keys, told the Times that it received 70 requests a day from users trying to access their digital wallets – a number that is three times higher than it was a month ago.
