SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Ever accidentally throw out something and thought, wait, not that. Well, you might spare a thought for James Howells, a computer engineer from Newport, Wales, who explains...
JAMES HOWELLS: One evening in the summer of 2013, I decided to do a clearout of all the old equipment in my office. And unfortunately, in a case of mistaken identity, the wrong hard drive was placed into the bin bag.
SIMON: And that hard drive went into the garbage and was then carted off to the local landfill. What was on that hard drive? A 51-character key that would give him access to the digital currency that he says he mined in Bitcoin's early days - and not just a few bitcoins' worth, James Howells insists that the bitcoins would be worth almost $800 million today. He didn't immediately realize the enormity of his error, but then...
HOWELLS: I was online reading a BBC News article about a guy from Oslo who had purchased bitcoin when it had been $10 per coin. and he recently sold and purchased a penthouse in the city center of Oslo.
SIMON: He says he instantly turned around, checked his drawer and realized that the wrong hard drive had been disposed.
HOWELLS: I was sort of rechecking the price every day, and there was an extra million added on every day. So that kind of added to the panic.
SIMON: Howells says he knew he needed to act fast if he was going to find his buried bitcoin fortune.
HOWELLS: Well, the first thing I did was visited the landfill site and spoke to the director of operations there. He was very friendly and explained the whole process to me and how material is buried on site, but he himself couldn't grant me access to come and search for my property.
SIMON: That power lies with the Newport City Council, and for more than a decade now, James Howells has been fighting the council for permission to dig through tens of thousands of tons of trash. He says he even has a team ready to begin digging.
HOWELLS: So it's not just a one-man band - me and my digger. Obviously, that's not going to cut it. So I've gone out and recruited a professional team of remediation experts who have completed landfill excavations to the highest standards elsewhere in the UK.
SIMON: The council's always said no, telling him and NPR that digging through the trash would have an enormous environmental impact on the surrounding area. James Howells is suing to try to overturn that decision. He recently floated the possibility of buying the landfill. The council has also ruled that out. But even if he was allowed to send in diggers and they managed to find the hard drive buried under years of garbage, could the digital key be recovered?
HOWELLS: Obviously, the outside case - it will be rusted, damaged, dented, etc., but the data isn't stored on the outside of the hard drive. It's stored on a mini disk inside the hard drive.
SIMON: If they strike bitcoin gold, Mr. Howells says that he would split the proceeds with investors who put up cash for the search and with locals in Newport and then use his share to fulfill a dream.
HOWELLS: I would like to turn South Wales into a crypto hub and basically making crypto the next sort of industry that is powering South Wales forward. Because at the moment, this local area is dying.
SIMON: Given all the consternation, you might think James Howells regrets ever getting involved with cryptocurrency.
HOWELLS: Yeah, obviously, my life has changed. It's gone on a different path to what it would have done, for example, say I didn't get involved in Bitcoin at all or if I still had the private key that I'm looking for. But, you know, we're all on an adventure, aren't we?
SIMON: We sure are.
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