A BRITISH man who accidentally threw a hard drive loaded with bitcoin into the trash has offered the local authority where he lives more than US$70 million if it allows him to excavate a landfill site.

IT worker James Howells got rid of the drive, which held a digital store of 7,500 bitcoins, between June and August in 2013. He had originally mined the virtual currency four years earlier when it was of little value.

But when the cryptocurrency shot up in value and he went in search of it, he discovered that he had mistakenly thrown the hard drive out with the trash.

Now, with his lost bitcoin having soared even further, Howells has approached Newport City Council in Wales to ask for permission to dig a specific section of the landfill site where he believes the hard drive ended up.

In return, he has offered to pay the council a quarter of the current value of the hoard, which he says could be distributed to local residents.

The digital currency was created in 2009 by an anonymous computer programmer or group of programmers known as Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoins are essentially computer files that are stored in a “digital wallet” on your device. They can then be used as payment, with every transaction being recorded in a public list known as blockchain. The price of bitcoin hit an all-time high in recent days and is now trading around US$37,000.

Howells first discovered that the hard drive was missing when his bitcoin was worth around US$9 million. Based on the current rates, he estimates it would be worth around US$273 million.

“I offered to donate 25 percent or £52.5 million (US$71.7 million) to the city of Newport in order to distribute to all local residents who live in Newport should I find and recover the bitcoins,” he said Friday.

“This would work out to approx £175 per person for the entire city [316,000 population].”

After discovering the mistake, Howells went to the garbage dump to see where the hard drive might have ended up.

“As soon as I saw the site, I thought you’ve got no chance. The area covered is huge,” he said.

However, he now believes he knows how to retrieve it.

“The plan would be to dig a specific area of the landfill based on a grid reference system and recover the hard drive whilst adhering to all safety and environmental standards,” he said.

“The drive would then be presented to data recovery specialists who can rebuild the drive from scratch with new parts and attempt to recover the tiny piece of data that I need in order to access the bitcoins.”

A spokeswoman for Newport City Council said the local government authority had been “contacted a number of times since 2013 about the possibility of retrieving a piece of IT hardware said to contain bitcoins.” The spokeswoman said the council had not refused the offer — but rather, was not permitted to excavate the site.

(SD-Agencies)