What James Howells wants to do is, on his behalf, simple: to buy a landfill, dig tens of thousands of tons of garbage, shopping every cassone piece on any persistent metal object and, therefore, finds the lost hard drive that contains his own Wrong discarded bitcoin key, for a value of about $ 800 million.
“This seems logical,” said Howells on his plan.
For more than a decade, Mr. Howells has implored, negotiated and begged anyone – very often, the Newport City Council, in South Wales – to obtain access to the waste mountains in search of his cryptographic white whale: a disc rigid that was accidentally thrown away in 2013.
He ensured a data recovery company and an excavator. He enrolled the former landfill director to map the site. He brought the case to court, unnecessarily. So far the city has refused to let him dig the landfill and is planning to close the site forever.
Now, in what could be the final phase of his journey Pequodian, Mr. Howells has a last question from the Newport City Council: if he does not allow him to dig his place, let him buy.
“It looks like a better plan for me and the city,” said Howells, who imagines eliminating the garbage and convert the site to a park, or perhaps make it a landfill site again. “The landfill is cleaned. I can dig for my hard drive. “
In the difficult situation of Mr. Howells is both universal and sensational. Who among us has not accidentally launched something value? How many have tried, however unnecessarily, to get it back?
The potential value of Mr. Howells’s error also raises a more complicated question: who owns our garbage once they disappear, especially when it is worth more than half a billion dollars?
The circumstances that have brought Mr. Howells at the moment are well documented. An analyst of computer science was cleaning his office in 2013 when he left a rigid album between a pile of garbage intended for the landfill carelessly. A wrong communication with his partner at the time led the push to be collected and brought to landfill.
What Mr. Howells did not realize was that the rigid-a backup disk of an old game-game computer was the only copy of his 51-character private key, used to access Bitcoin wallets. Mr. Howell had extracted the cryptocurrency as a hobbyist in the late 2000s, when he was mostly useless.
It was months later, when Mr. Howells realized the stakes of the error: his Bitcoin portfolio was once worth millions. Since then he has tried to recover the journey, hoping that even after 12 years, part of the disc could be saved.
It is located on its way is the Newport City Council, which states that the elusive hard drive belongs to the city, even if it had to be recovered. (It was not, and according to the city, any attempt to do it would be at a prohibitive cost.) A judge supported the advice. Mr. Howells insists that the album is still legally his own, claiming that he has been technically discarded without his permission by third parties. He even offered to divide Bitcoin luck with the city, but he was rejected.
The desperate and desperate research of Howells is not a surprise for experts in the world of cryptocurrencies, where the fortunes are fleeting and a small and poorly studded decision can separate the winners from the losers.
“In general, the experience of a number of people involved in cryptographic resources has been, perhaps not so drastic, but quite similar,” said Iwa Salami, a Fintech regulation professor at the Royal Docks School of Business and Law, university of East London. “Industry is one who can leave people with regrets, in particular when selling or purchasing cryptoasset at the wrong time.”
The critics and the Newport City Council defined a commission for Mr. Howells, a journey of towering poles without any guarantee that a buried and buried album of 12 years is even found, not to mention the legible. But Mr. Howells says that numbers alone make the search for the proverbial hay shovel.
“This needle is very, very, very precious – $ 800 million,” said Howells of the hard disk. “Which means that I am willing to look for every piece of hay to find the needle.”
Howell’s latest effort comes after losing a case in the British high court trying to force the Newport City Council to let him dig the landfill. A judge said that the pursuit of the wild hard drive had “no successful realistic perspective”, even if brought to a higher court.
Not long after, the city has announced its intention to close and limit the site, a fact that Mr. Howells says that it should have been disclosed in recent judicial proceedings. Regardless of this, he believes that his proposal to buy the site would save the money of the long -term city.
“They did not say they are willing to sell it,” Howells recognized, before mentioning a series of regulatory statutes and budget projections that say they suggest that the city should.
The Newport City Council has refused to further comment on the matter, even if it would seriously consider the offer of Mr. Howells. A spokesman for the office indicated a 2023 declaration, which said: “We were very clear and consistent in our answers that we cannot help Mr. Howells in this subject. Our position has not changed. “
Those who study cryptocurrency markets – and psychology behind them – did not expect obstacles to hurt Mr. Howells.
“It’s human, right?” Mrs. Salami said. Rise, remembering a recent case in which she herself had lost a moments of contact lenses before an important event. He had looked for furiously, even snatching the garbage to find it. Imagine, he said, if he was worth half a billion dollars.
“Some people can leave and go on and count it as a loss,” he said. “Some people will not be able to go on.”