The Story of James Howell
In 2013, 36-year-old engineer James Howell threw away the hard drive containing the cryptographic key to his Bitcoin wallet while clearing out his house. Howell used to have two identical hard drives and ended up throwing away the wrong one, locking himself out of his 8,000 BTC holdings, which would be worth millions of the dollars as of the current exchange.
This hard drive ended up in a landfill in New Port, Wales. Howell has been trying to get permission to excavate the landfill to retrieve his lost drive for nearly a decade with no luck. The local government of New Port believes that trying to dig up the drive would adversely affect the environment and has thus firmly denied his requests.
Things took an interesting turn this year. Howell brought on venture capitalists (VCs) Hanspeter Jaberg and Karl Wendeborn to fund his excavation attempt using robot dogs as well as a team of eight experts in data extraction and landfill excavation. This final effort to extract the hard drive would cost the VCs US$11 million. If the drive is successfully retrieved, the VCs will receive US$50 million worth of Bitcoin. Howell intends to keep 30% of the rest of the holdings, give another 30% to those who work on the excavation and also give US$60 to each resident of New Port.
