Man Who Lost His Bitcoin Fortune May Be Able to Get It Back Another Way, Expert Says

James Howells claims he had about 8,000 Bitcoin on a hard drive, which his former partner accidentally threw out while he was clearing out his office.

A bloke who claims he had about 8,000 Bitcoin on a hard drive, which his former partner accidentally threw out while she was clearing out his office, might be able to get it back some other way, according to an expert.

James Howells had the cryptocurrency on a hard drive, which he kept in a drawer at his former office in Newport, South Wales.

He said his ex-partner was asked to clear out the office and throw away his rubbish, but she accidentally included the hard drive in the bin bag.

After realising the mistake, Howells has been trying to get Newport City Council to let him dig his hard drive out of the landfill site he says it's buried in.

He has even sued the council in an attempt to get the green light to go mining for Bitcoin.

Howells reckons he knows exactly where the hard drive is, though it's been over a decade since it was thrown away, so whether or not it's in any condition to be usable again is anybody's guess.

With the value of Bitcoin climbing, the amount his treasure trove is worth keeps increasing and it's now worth somewhere in the region of £569 million, so you can understand why he'd want to have it back.

The council has said an excavation of the site is 'not possible' and warned that letting Howells dig up the landfill site would have a 'huge environmental impact'.

Howells previously offered the local area 25 percent of the Bitcoin treasure to fund community projects, which he later reduced to 10 percent as he gathered investors to back his attempts to recover the hard drive.

But he might not have to go digging according to a cryptocurrency expert, who said there might be another way for him to recover his funds.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Hadyn Jones said that if Howells still had the 'seed phrase' for his Bitcoin wallet then he might be able to get the 'key' back.

That's rather the crucial thing here, the 'key' is on the hard drive and if he has some record or memory of the 'seed phrase', a series of random words, then Howells might be able to get back in.

Jones explained: "So, as long as he has that, he is quids in. If he doesn't, it's sayōnara."

He added that without the key or the seed phrase it would be 'computably infeasible' to get into the cryptocurrency wallet, so you'd hope that Howells has written it down somewhere and just didn't know that these random words might hold the key to his forgotten fortune.

Sadly for Howells, cryptocurrency investigator Paul Sibenik told the Mail there might not even be a seed phrase, which would mean that unless he can find the hard drive with the original key on it he's screwed.

He said that the Bitcoin would be 'inaccessible forever' without the hard drive, so it'd seem like plan A of trying to get permission to dig it out is still his best bet.