Man Who Lost Bitcoin Passcode Disk In Dumpster Secures $6M In Funding
- James Howells lost the passcode to his Bitcoin in 2013 and now plans to locate the hardrive in which the passcode is present
- To do so, he has gathered $6 million from two firms and also plans to employ robotic dogs to the task
Former IT worker James Howells, who understood the potential of the cryptocurrency market much earlier and could have been a multimillionaire by now, is reluctantly scouring a UK landfill in Newport, Wales, where he hopes to find a missing drive containing the passcode for a crypto wallet with 8,000 Bitcoin.
Howells accidentally lost the chance to become an early crypto millionaire by throwing a wrong disk drive into the bin in 2013. His life goal to find that drive has turned out to have robot dogs.
In a recent interview with Business Insider, Howell revealed that he has a foolproof $11 million business plan to rescue his Bitcoin from an actual garbage pile. He aims to use the business plan to get inventors and the Newport City Council on board to help him in excavating the 110,000 tons of trash piled over three years.
Howell has already reportedly grabbed funding from two Venture capitalists, Hanspeter Jaberg and Karl Wendeborn if his plan gets approval from the local government. Notably, a $6 million version of the plan would go over 1.5 years.
Since Howells first approached them with his situation, the city council has refused to engage with him in any way. Howells apparently started communicating with the Welsh city administration in 2014, claiming that while the case might be harmed, the internal drive should still be functional.
The council has stated that the cost of digging up the heap may reach into the millions, along with serious environmental implications for the surrounding region. He had even pledged to pay the local administration 25% of the crypto revenue if they would only let him dig around in the trash pile.
If approved, the plan aims to sort the garbage at a separate pop-up facility near the landfill using human pickers and an artificial intelligence system to spot that hard drive amidst all other items. Howell has even brought eight experts in AI, excavation, data extraction, and waste management.
Howell has also planned to make use of the Boston Dynamics robotic dogs (each “Spot” model costs $74,500 at the time of release), which are used as CCTV cameras to scan grounds for the hard drive. He has already decided the names for the two: “Satoshi” after Satoshi Nakamoto, who developed Bitcoin, and “Hal” after Hal Finney, who was the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction. Howell, who describes himself on his LinkedIn bio as a project manager working in blockchain technology, doesn’t seem to be giving up and is determined to rescue his missing millions.
A crypto journalist with over 3 years of experience in DeFi, NFT, metaverse, etc. Parth has worked with major media outlets in the crypto and finance world and has gained experience and expertise in crypto culture after surviving bear and bull markets over the years.
