Howells threw away his wrong hard drive in 2013; he didn’t throw away the empty one, but the hard drive with all his bitcoins on it.
This eventually ended up in a garbage bag at the local landfill in Newport. And so he decided to convince the city council of his mission to find that hard drive among all the waste, but they thought it was not environmentally friendly, too time-consuming and too expensive.
And so for almost ten years, he’s been in the thick of things, but he’s not giving up on his search. His renewed bid to go into the dump is even backed by a financier, and could potentially cost more than ten million euros. And all this by finding somewhere between 100,000 tons of waste on his hard drive.
But what is the key to success? Human sorters, robot dogs, and an artificial intelligence machine that searches hard drives on an assembly line is the idea. His most comprehensive plan costs 10.76 million euros, lasts three years and searches all the waste. A more limited version costs 5.87 million euros and lasts 18 months.
Experts
For the plan, he involved experts from different fields of work; they get a bonus if the hard drive is found.
Howells plans to have machines dig up the garbage. That is then sorted in a temporary facility near the landfill. People are going to search this along with a machine from an Oregon company called Max-AI. The machine will look like a scanner above a conveyor belt.
Max-AI’s Remi Le Grand told Insider that the company wants to train AI algorithms to find hard drives similar to Howells’s. A mechanical arm picks promising items from the trash.
Howell hasn’t forgotten about security. To prevent other interested parties from digging themselves, two robotic “spotting” dogs from Bosten Dynamics will patrol the site at night. The plan is to have cameras on the site as well.
Local council
The most important thing now is that the city council approves the plan so that it can be implemented.
“There is nothing that Mr. Howells could present to us” that could make the board agree, a board representative told Insider. “His proposals pose a significant environmental risk that we cannot accept or consider under the terms of our permit.”
And if it is allowed, the question is whether the hard disk is still intact. So for now, Howell’s nightmare isn’t over.