What James Howells wants to do is, by his account, simple: buy a landfill, excavate tens of thousands of tons of trash, cart every piece by dump truck to a scanner with A.I.-trained detection technology, install a backup magnetic belt to pick up any lingering metallic objects and, thus, find the long-lost hard drive that contains his mistakenly discarded bitcoin key, worth somewhere around $800 million.
“This seems logical,” Mr. Howells said of his plan.
For more than a decade, Mr. Howells has begged, negotiated and pleaded with anyone — most often, the Newport City Council, in South Wales — to get access to the mountains of waste in pursuit his crypto White Whale: a hard drive that was accidentally thrown away in 2013.
He has secured a data recovery firm and an excavator. He has enlisted the former landfill director to map out the site. He has taken the case to court, to no avail. The city has so far refused to let him excavate the landfill, and is planning to close the site for good.
Now, in what may be the final stage of his Pequodian journey, Mr. Howells has one final ask of the Newport City Council: If it won’t let him dig up the place, let him buy it.
“Seems like a better plan for me and the city,” said Mr. Howells, who envisions clearing out the trash and converting the site to a park, or perhaps making it a dump site again. “The landfill gets cleaned. I get to dig for my hard drive.”
