The man who wants to dig up a city dump to find a hard drive containing a fortune in bitcoins

Howells, computer engineer, accidentally dropped the hard drive in 2013 having mined 8,000 bitcoins in the early stages of the coin’s development.

The value of bitcoin fluctuates wildly. For example, the value of what Howells owned was around $250 million in January 2021, but with the big drop earlier this year, it is now significantly less.

The Newport City Council, which manages the landfill where Howells believes the hard drive is, has consistently denied him access to the site to dig for environmental and access reasons.

To recover the hard drive an enormous amount of manual excavation work would be required to remove thousands of tons of compacted waste that has been accumulating on the site for decades.

But the computer engineer believes that he now has the funds and knowledge to do this in an effective and environmentally beneficial way for the site.

“Excavating a landfill is a big operation in itself,” he said.

“The funding is secured and we have hired an artificial intelligence specialist. Their technology can easily be trained to search for a hard drive.”

That’s not all: “We also have an environmental team on board. Basically, we have a full team of various expertswith various skills, and by uniting all of us, we will be able to complete this task to a very high standard.”

But finding the hard drive is only part of this monumental task. There is no guarantee that, if found, its state is recoverable.

But if so, its owner is more than ready to receive a mega sum of money, although the actual amount will depend on the direction of the highly volatile cryptocurrency.

In any case, it is likely to be many millions of dollars.

That will have to subtract what Howells has promised to give to the community, 10% of the profits. And he already has in mind how he will invest them: “We have a complete list of initiatives,” he added.

“One of the things we’d like to do at the current landfill, once we’ve cleaned up and reclaimed that land, is put a power generation facility, maybe a couple of wind turbines. We would also like to put a community bitcoin mining facility and use that clean electricity from the turbines to create cryptocurrency for the people of Newport,” he explained.

Among his many plans, there is also the proposal of give about 60 dollars in bitcoins for each person of Newport and install cryptocurrency-based terminals in all stores.

But authorities have responded to each Howells request with a denial.

“We have legal duties that we must comply with in the management of the landfill,” said a spokesman. “Part of this is managing the ecological risk to the site and surrounding areas. Mr. Howells’ proposals pose a significant ecological risk that We can not accept and that, in fact, due to the terms of the landfill management permit, they are not even considered”.

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