UK resident wants robots to find $181 million bitcoins he dumped 9 years ago
James Howells has reportedly planned a highly sophisticated and complex drive costing $11 million ( ₹87 crore). The former IT professional plans to deploy human sorters, robot dogs and artificial intelligence-powered machine trained to look for hard drives on a conveyor belt.
James Howells, a resident of Newport in United Kingdom threw away his hard drive nine years ago thinking it was empty. What he didn't know was that the drive about the size of an iPhone 6 contained 8,000 bitcoins whose current value is about $181 million ( ₹1,443 crores). Now, he wants to retrieve the hard disk from one lakh metric tonnes of dump to get access to the bitcoins he mined in 2009, Insider reported.
He wants to use four-legged 'Boston Dynamics' robots to locate the hard drive in the day and also protect the dump yard from trespassers in the night. Howells has reportedly planned a highly sophisticated and complex drive whose budget is pegged at $11 million ( ₹87 crore). The former IT professional plans to deploy human sorters, robot dogs and artificial intelligence-powered machine trained to look for hard drives on a conveyor belt, the website reported.
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Howells has estimated three years to complete this project. But the major hurdle to his Herculean mission comes from the local authorities. The Newport city council has refuted his requests to dig for his hard drive, saying the exercise is expensive and poses significant ecological risk.
But the former techie refuses to give up and is fighting to secure access to the dump site. He has also promised to not cause any environmental risk. He has even managed to assemble a team of eight experts specialising in AI-powered sorting, landfill excavation etc. Among the team members is an advisor who worked a firm that restored data from the black box of crashed Columbia space shuttle.
