2 weeks Ago
A Bitcoin expert has revealed a man's £569m cryptocurrency fortune, stored on a hard drive that was accidentally tossed into a tip, could still be recovered. Heartbroken James Howells' 'key' to unlocking his vast stash of 8,000 Bitcoin was thrown into a Welsh landfill by his ex-girlfriend, Halfina Eddy-Evans. Howells had spent weeks mining his digital currency in 2009, loading his riches on to a hard drive before forgetting about it and allowing it to be binned.
Since then, his lost collection of Bitcoins has skyrocketed in value and is now estimated to be worth an eye-watering sum of more than half-a-billion pounds. Mr Howell is now desperately fighting with his local council in Newport for the rights to search dig up the landfill fill site in a bid to find his hidden fortune. And today, a finance specialist said there is a slim chance Mr Howell could recover his millions without his hard drive as long he has kept its 'seed phrase' - a series of random words used to regenerate the key that controls access to his Bitcoin wallet.
Haydn Jones, an accredited expert witness relating to digital assets, said: 'If he has recorded the seed phrase somewhere physically, then that could be possible. 'It's very easy to do as long as he has the piece of paper with it. So, as long as he has that, he is quids in.
If he doesn't, it's sayōnara.' James Howells has vowed to take a council to court in his final bid to unearth the 'key' to a Bitcoin jackpot That digital key is on a laptop hard drive he believes is currently buried somewhere in 110,000 tons of rubbish in a nearby landfill, now grassed over But Mr Jones warned if Mr Howells did not have the seed phrase, then the chances of cracking into his digital wallet, without a working drive, would be nearly impossible. 'There is no computably feasible way of cracking that private key.
It's computably infeasible to crack it – there's not enough time in the universe to do that,' he added. Cyber investigator Paul Sibenik,..
. Tom Cotterill.
