Topics: Bitcoin, Money, Cryptocurrency, Technology, Wales, UK News
A Bitcoin expert has revealed there is a way a man could recover the fortune he lost on a hard drive that was thrown away.
We all know that heart-sinking feeling when you realise you’ve lost or misplaced something, but imagine how it must feel when the lost object contains a lot of money. For James Howells, this is unfortunately his reality.
Howells’ hard drive went missing back in 2013, and the IT engineer from Newport, Wales, says it contained 8,000 Bitcoins. His partner accidentally threw it out, and the cryptocurrency is worth an eye-watering amount today.
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After discovering that the hard drive is at Newport City Council’s landfill site, Howells immediately called the council and asked them to retrieve it.
Unfortunately, they refused, and Howells has been locked in a battle ever since. He decided to sue the council for $648m for not allowing him to come and find the hard drive.
Howells previously told how he had assembled a ‘full consortium of experts’ to help him pinpoint the hard drive’s exact location, including recovery experts from NASA who worked on the Columbia space shuttle disaster, he told ITV.
Howells also told the BBC the hard drive is now worth over $632,079,290. And to make the stakes even higher for Howells, since Donald Trump won the 2024 US Presidential Election, there has been a spike in the price of the digital currency, which has reached an all-time high.
A finance specialist has offered some hopeful advice, suggesting that one way Howells could retrieve his fortune is if he recorded the ‘seed phrase’ somewhere physically.
Also known as a “mnemonic phrase”, a seed phrase is a series of bunds that serve as a backup and recovery tool for cryptocurrency wallets.
Haydn Jones, an accredited expert witness relating to digital assets, told MailOnline: “If he has recorded the seed phrase somewhere physically, then that could be possible.
“It's very easy to do as long as he has the piece of paper with it. So, as long as he has that, he is quids in. If he doesn't, it's sayōnara.”
However, the expert warned that the chances are still slim and if Howells did not have the seed phrase, then the chances of cracking into his digital wallet would be impossible without a working hard drive.
“There is no computably feasible way of cracking that private key. It's computably infeasible to crack it – there's not enough time in the universe to do that.”
And cyber and cryptocurrency investigator Paul Sibenik believes it’s unlikely a seed phrase had been created, which essentially ruins Howells’ chance of reclaiming his digital fortune.
The only slim chance was by accessing electronic copies of the private keys on the computer.
“There is no hope of guessing the private key - which people sometimes liken to an extremely strong password. So, if the hard drive cannot be found and accessed, the Bitcoin will remain inaccessible forever.”
A spokesman for Newport Council said the council has told Howells 'multiple times' an excavation is 'not possible under our environmental permit and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area' and that it's the 'only body authorised to carry out operations on the site' and 'follows a strict monitoring and reporting regime for all environmental parameters'.
