The man who lost a hard drive with 733 million euros in Bitcoin ends his search 12 years later: 'Now I can show it to the world'
'I won’t stop until I recover the hard drive,' James Howells promised himself, spending 12 years moving heaven and earth to retrieve a memory device that his girlfriend -who is no longer his- accidentally threw away. All this time, he claims his work, his daily life, has consisted of fighting with all the instances and bureaucracies in his path to obtain the precious object, precious rather for what it contains.
It happened in 2013. James was hoarding nothing less than the key to 8,000 bitcoins, the digital currency created in 2009 characterized by being limited, 21 million units, or by its strong fluctuations. Nowadays, there are more cryptocurrencies, but this one was the pioneer and remains the most used and with the highest market value. And although it is not physical money, the medium where this young man stored it was indeed physical.
It has been the BBC that has been following the development of the story, which in recent hours has begun a new episode, surely the last. Howells has poured his recent life into the square meters occupied by the Newport landfill in Wales, where he resides. 'It makes sense to focus my energy on this,' he said. Perhaps it is because right now those coins mean a staggering 733 million euros.
A million-dollar reward
Howells can afford it; his livelihood does not depend on that memory, but rather on a radical leap in status and quality of life. He moves in the crypto world and is doing relatively well. He seems not to like the real, or tangible world, as he has even turned to artificial intelligence for legal advice rather than lawyers. But in this last aspect, he has not had much success, judging by the result.
