The man who threw away 7,500 bitcoins does not rest: he wants to dig the landfill with 2 robot dogs Spot

James Howells continues to headbutt himself against a stone wall. But he does not give up: the reward is almost 200 million euros … and going down.

Sure James Howells dreams every night of that fateful day in 2013 when threw a hard drive in the trash. She didn’t realize that contained 7,500 bitcoins that in their best moments came to be worth almost 500 million euros.

With Bitcoin plummeting, today they are worth about 150 million euros, which is still a paste. Thus, the race against time is twofold: on the one hand, so that those bitcoins don’t go to landfill. And on the other, so that its value does not continue to fall to the point that they are no longer worth recovering.

In these 9 years, James Howells has fought every day so that the City Council of Newport, in the south of Wales, let him search the municipal landfill, unsuccessfully. He even went so far as to offer 25% of the bitcoins as a reward to the municipal authorities.

The council argues that the hard drive must be buried about 15 meters deepunder thousands of tons of garbage.

Removing the landfill would cost millions of euros, there is a risk of environmental contamination, and there are no guarantees that the disc will appear. And if it does, it’s unlikely it will still work, after years of being corroded by garbage.

Also, the city council itself only has a license to store the garbagenot to remove it or poke at it.

James Howells even hired experts from NASA who worked on the Columbia disaster to recover the data, as well as engineers and ecologists to measure the environmental impact and gauge the risks and cost.

And now, according to Business Insider accounthas had another idea: he has raised money from two venture capitalists to buy two Spot robot dogs from Boston Dynamicswhich have a cost of 150,000 euros, with which will dig in the landfill in search of the missing hard drive.

These Spot robots would carry traveling closed-circuit television cameras and they would scan the ground for his missing hard drive.

But it does not let be another idea that for the city council they will always have the same answer: “There is nothing that Mr. Howells can present to us that would convince us to allow him access to the place.“, explains a spokesman for the city council in Business Insider. “Your proposals pose an ecological risk that we cannot accept and, in fact, our powers prevent us from considering it“.

Even if he managed to find it, James Howells would still have to face another equally difficult challenge: recover hard drive contentswhich after 9 years buried in 15 meters of garbage, could be deleted or corrupted.

With each passing day, Howells’ hopes fade. But he refuses to throw in the towel. It’s all he has left.