According to a cryptocurrency specialist, James Howells, a British guy who unintentionally threw away a hard drive that contained about 8,000 Bitcoin, may get a second chance at getting his enormous money back.
During an office purge in 2013, Howells’s former partner unintentionally threw out the hard drive. Given that the hard drive was tangled in trash bags, she maintains that there was a miscommunication. Since then, Howells has fought the Newport City Council to remove the hard drive from the landfill where he thinks it is buried. The council has rejected his requests, claiming possible environmental impact, even though he has assured them that he can locate it.
As Bitcoin’s value has soared, the missing fortune is now estimated at £569 million. To incentivize the council, Howells once offered 25 percent of the treasure for community projects, later reducing the offer to 10 percent as investors joined his recovery efforts.
However, an alternative solution may exist. Hadyn Jones, a cryptocurrency expert, suggested that if Howells remembers or has written down his wallet’s “seed phrase”—a series of random words crucial to accessing Bitcoin wallets—he might not need the hard drive. “As long as he has that, he is quids in,” Jones explained. Without it, recovering the Bitcoin becomes “computably infeasible.”
Unfortunately, another expert, cryptocurrency investigator Paul Sibenik, cautioned that the wallet might not have a seed phrase. In that case, the only hope would be retrieving the original hard drive, leaving Howells reliant on his uphill battle to secure excavation approval.
For now, Howells’s millions remain tantalizingly out of reach, buried either in his memory or the landfill. His predicament serves as a poignant reminder of the critical importance of securing access keys in the volatile world of cryptocurrency.