Man asks NASA for help for losing bitcoins

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The crazy rise in the prices of digital currencies, especially bitcoin, prompted a young American to ask NASA for help to find a hard drive containing a password to access his encrypted currency account, which he had thrown away, which he had thrown away. To return to. he millions of dollars if he finds it.
For eight years, a British programmer desperately tried to recover the old hard drive containing the password for a digital wallet after it was dumped in a landfill.

You are now in talks with a company that helped NASA recover data from an exploded space shuttle.

James Howells from South Wales hoarded bitcoin when it cost next to nothing and the cryptocurrency was only known in narrow tech circles. He managed to accumulate around 7,500 bitcoins, now worth more than $ 350 million.

A private encryption key to access bitcoins was kept on a hard drive, which was accidentally dumped at the Docksway landfill near Newport, Wales, in 2013. The man thought his old computer contained nothing but junk.

Realizing the mistake that cost him a fortune, he tries to rummage through the trash, but to no avail. He estimated that his hard drive was located somewhere in an area of ​​200 square meters, up to 15 meters deep under all the garbage, so much so that he offered the city council responsible for the site a quarter of any fortune he found. Howells also established a Bitcoin Recovery Fund, seeking help in the treasure hunt.

It appears that a data recovery company previously hired by NASA is now eager to help Howells, according to British media reports. Ontrack, the Minneapolis company, was able to recover the hard drive from the wrecked space shuttle Columbia in 2003, although the device was found months later.

“They were able to retrieve it from a shuttle that exploded and they don’t seem to think being in a landfill would be a problem,” Howells told The Sun this week.

However, the man does not yet have official permission to dig the landfill, as the council fears that the expensive excavations will not produce results and may have a “significant environmental impact on the surrounding area,” according to Russia Today.

According to various empirical analyzes of the blockchain, where all bitcoin transactions are recorded, billions of dollars in accumulated bitcoins have been lost forever over the years. In 2018, blockchain analytics company Chainalysis estimated that passwords for cryptocurrency wallets containing between 2.78 million and 3.79 million bitcoins would never be recovered.