A Bitcoin specialist has disclosed a potential method for a man to retrieve the substantial fortune he lost on a discarded hard drive.
Losing something valuable can be distressing, but the stakes are even higher when the lost item holds a significant financial value. James Howells, an IT engineer from Newport, Wales, is experiencing this unfortunate situation firsthand.
In 2013, Howells’ hard drive, containing 8,000 Bitcoins, was mistakenly thrown away by his partner. Today, the value of that cryptocurrency is staggering.
Upon realizing the hard drive was at Newport City Council’s landfill site, Howells contacted the council with a request to retrieve it.
However, the council declined his request, leading Howells into a prolonged legal battle. In response, he initiated a lawsuit against the council, seeking $648 million for their refusal to allow him to search for the hard drive.
Howells previously mentioned assembling a team of experts to help locate the hard drive, including NASA recovery specialists involved in the Columbia space shuttle disaster, as he shared with ITV.
He also informed the BBC that the hard drive’s current value exceeds $632,079,290. The stakes have risen even further for Howells, as the digital currency’s price surged to an all-time high following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US Presidential Election.
A finance expert has provided some optimistic guidance, suggesting that Howells might recover his fortune if he documented the ‘seed phrase’ in a physical form.
The seed phrase, also known as a “mnemonic phrase,” is a set of words that serves as a recovery and backup tool for cryptocurrency wallets.
Haydn Jones, a certified expert in digital assets, explained to 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.”
Nonetheless, the expert cautioned that the probability remains slim, and without the seed phrase, accessing his digital wallet would be impossible without a functioning 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.”
Cyber and cryptocurrency investigator Paul Sibenik expressed doubt about the existence of a seed phrase, which would severely limit Howells’ chances of retrieving his digital wealth.
The only remaining possibility would be to access 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 spokesperson for Newport Council stated that Howells has been informed ‘multiple times’ that 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.’ The council is ‘the only body authorized to carry out operations on the site’ and adheres to ‘a strict monitoring and reporting regime for all environmental parameters.’