In any case, the local authorities warned regarding the ecological risk that digging in the dump might mean.
When did it happen
According to what they specify, the computer engineer accidentally threw away the hard drive in 2013 following having mined 8,000 bitcoins in the early stages of coin developmentwhen it meant a boom.
In that sense, the value of bitcoin fluctuates wildly. For example, the value of what Howells had was around 250 million dollars in January 2021, but with the big drop that occurred earlier this year, it is now significantly less, reports La Nación.
The denial and the difficult mission to recover it
The newport city hallwhich manages the landfill where Howells believes the hard drive is located, has consistently denied him access to the site to dig for access and environmental reasons.
Retrieving the hard drive would require an enormous amount of manual excavation work to remove thousands of tons of compacted debris that has been accumulating at 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.
“Financing is secured and we have hired an artificial intelligence specialist. Your technology can easily be trained to look for a hard drive.”.
Thats not all: “We also have an environmental team on board. Basically, we have a whole team of various experts, with various skills, and by coming together, 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 status will be recoverable.
But if so, its owner is more than ready to receive a mega sum of moneyalthough the current amount will depend on the direction that the highly volatile cryptocurrency takes.
To that will have to be subtracted what Howells has promised give to the community, 10% of profits. And he already has in mind how he will invest them: “We have a whole list of initiatives,” she added.
“One of the things we’d like to do on the current landfill, once we’ve cleared and reclaimed that land, is put in a power generation facility, maybe a couple of wind turbines. We would also like to put together a community bitcoin mining facility that uses that clean electricity from the turbines to create cryptocurrency for the people of Newport.”he explained.
