Crypto user who lost $163M in Bitcoin wants to deploy robot search party: Report

cointelegraph.com:

James Howells, a British man who mistakenly discarded a hard drive containing roughly 7,500 Bitcoin in 2013 has reportedly started looking at having robots and humans work together to retrieve his crypto from a local landfill.

According to a Sunday report from Business Insider, Howells has pitched an $11-million idea to locate and recover the lost hard drive, which may be surrounded by up to roughly 110,000 tons of garbage. The proposal, backed by a few venture capitalists, involved having people, robot dogs, and other machines pick up and sort through the landfill's trash for up to three years until the lost Bitcoin (BTC) is found, while another version of Howells’ plan would cost $6 million and take 18 months.

Many crypto users know Howells’ actions as a telltale story of the importance of keeping track of one’s coins, whether by securely storing private keys or a physical hardware wallet. The Brit threw away the hard drive containing the BTC in 2013 thinking it was blank, realizing months later that he had potentially lost millions of dollars’ worth of crypto.

Newport City Council, the government body responsible for overseeing operations in the landfill supposedly containing the lost hard drive with BTC, reportedly has denied Howells’ previous attempts to retrieve the device. A report from January 2021 — when the BTC price was more than $30,000 — suggested he had offered the city up to 25% of the value of the lost BTC as a relief donation amid rising costs due to the pandemic, but was still not given the opportunity to search.

"There is nothing that Mr. Howells could present to us [for approval]," reportedly said a council representative. "His proposals pose significant ecological risk, which we cannot accept and indeed