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Man wants to buy and search dump for hard drive worth $1 billion

February 28, 2025 · Comment icon 8 comments
Sefton Meadows Tip
A very expensive needle in a very big haystack. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 2.0 Mike Pennington
James Howells' former partner accidentally threw away a hard drive of bitcoin now worth hundreds of millions.
Craig Anderson: James Howells is considering buying a council dump in south Wales after his former partner accidentally threw away a hard drive containing his bitcoin wallet. Howells has already lost a high court case to allow him to search the tip for the hard drive, which he believes contains bitcoin worth £600 million.

But would it even be possible to find it? Let's do the maths.

Howells, a Welsh IT engineer, was an early adopter of the cryptocurrency bitcoin in December 2008. By February 2009, he had started mining the coins on his laptop - a process which involves using your computer to carry out complex mathematical processes in exchange for the coins.

At the time, he was one of just five people mining the currency, and he eventually accrued a fortune of around 8,000 bitcoin. Initially, these were basically worthless - the first real-world transaction involving the currency was in 2010, when a man in Florida bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins.

However, in the 15 years since, the value of the currency has grown dramatically, with a single bitcoin passing the US$100,000 mark in December 2024 - a value which would mean those two pizzas are now worth US$1 billion (£790 million).

Doing the calculations

No wonder Howells wants to find his hard drive. But what are the chances of finding a tiny 10cm hard drive in a site containing 1.4 billion kg of waste? Is it literally like finding a needle in a haystack?

At first, this seems like a simple calculation. If we randomly select a single location within the landfill, the probability that the hard drive will be there is simply the size of the object divided by the total size of the landfill.

A Google maps estimate of the area of the Docksway landfill site suggests it is roughly 500,000 square metres (or 5 billion square centimetres), which is approximately the size of 70 football pitches.

However, we also have to account for the depth of the landfill, with years of rubbish piled on top of each other. Even a conservative estimate of 20 metres would give a total volume of 10 million cubic metres (or 10 trillion cubic centimetres). This is roughly 3,600 times the volume of the swimming pool used at last summer's Paris Olympic Games.

Howells says the bitcoin are on a 2.5-inch hard drive, which has a volume of around 70 cubic centimetres (7cm x 10cm x 1cm). Therefore, the odds of finding the bitcoin at a single randomly selected location are 70/10,000,000,000,000 = 0.000000000007 - approximately a one in 143 billion chance.

This is over 3,000 times less likely than winning the jackpot on the UK's National Lottery. However, with £600 million on the line, it seems unlikely anyone would just turn up and search one single location.

So, the real question here is about time and money. If we know that the hard drive is located somewhere within the landfill site, how long would it take to find it, and how much would it cost?

If we focus on time to begin with, this is really just an extension of our first calculation. Suppose it takes 1 second to search each 1,000 cubic centimetre section of the landfill (an incomplete estimate since my experience of hunting landfill for hard drives is limited), then it would take us 10 billion seconds (or 316 years) of continuous searching to cover the entire site. But of course, this could be significantly reduced by having an entire team searching at the same time.
Is it financially worth it?

Clearly, Howells does not have 316 years available to complete his search, but what if he was given the resources for one full year of non-stop searching? The odds of finding the hard drive in this year would be 1 in 316, and while the chances remain slim, this might start to sound tempting given the potential reward.

That is where the aspect of cost comes in. How much would you be willing to pay in order to have a 1 in 316 chance of winning £600m? The answer lies in the statistical concept of "expected value"", which is the expected long-term outcome of a scenario if you were able to repeat it over and over again.

For example, suppose you were rolling a die, and you were told that you would be given £2 if you rolled a six but would have to pay £1 if you rolled any other value. You can work out the expected value of this game to see if it is worth playing. The odds of rolling a 6 are 1/6, and the odds of rolling any other value are 5/6. We can therefore compute the expected value as:

E [winnings] = 1/6 * £2 + 5/6 * (-£1) = 2/6 - 5/6 = -3/6 = -£1/2

In other words, you would expect to lose half of £1 (or 50p), on average, every time you played this game.

In the case of our bitcoins, we can think about the expected value as being the amount of money you would expect to make on average if you searched the landfill for a whole year. We would expect that, on average, we would find the hard drive (and the £600 million) 1 time out of 316, and would fail to find it 315 times out of 316 and get absolutely nothing. Therefore, we can compute the expected value as:

E [£ found] = 1/316 * £600m + 315/316 * 0 = £1,898,734

This means that on average, by searching the site for a year, you would expect to find £1.9 million. So, if the searching costs were less than this amount, you would expect to make a profit on average, and it may be considered a worthwhile investment. However, if the search cost more than £1.9 million, you would expect to lose money on average, and it would not be considered worthwhile.

These calculations can be easily adjusted to account for different lengths of search time, number of people searching, or indeed different sizes of landfill site or search area.

If Howell ever gets access to the dump, it might be worth having a statistician on hand to help guide the search (and of course, I would be happy to offer my services for a small fee...).

Craig Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Statistics, University of Glasgow

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Read the original article. The Conversation

Source: The Conversation | Comments (8)




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Recent comments on this story
Comment icon #1 Posted by Alchopwn 2 years ago
What he doesn't realize is that we should be using a similar tech to identify, grade,  and recycle everything in these dumps.  Probably more money in that than the drive.
Comment icon #2 Posted by pellinore 1 year ago
A computer expert who accidentally threw out his Bitcoin fortune has seen its value rocket to be up to £1.5billion - and has launched a legal fight to get it back. Early crypto investor James Howells, 38, made the calamitous mistake ten years ago when a misunderstanding saw his partner throw out as rubbish a black bin bag in which he was temporarily storing the hard drive containing the only access to his crypto assets. Distraught James has been trying to recover the disc from the council run dump ever since - and has now taken legal action to get access to search the dump. Computer exper... [More]
Comment icon #3 Posted by Still Waters 1 month ago
Man who lost bitcoin fortune in Welsh tip explores purchase of entire landfill A computer expert who has battled for a decade to recover a £600m bitcoin fortune he believes is buried in a council dump in south Wales is considering buying the site so he can hunt for the missing fortune. James Howells lost a high court case last month to force Newport city council to allow him to search the tip to retrieve a hard drive he says contains the bitcoins. The council has since announced plans to close and cap the site, which would almost certainly spell the end of any lingering hopes of reaching ... [More]
Comment icon #4 Posted by MissJatti 18 days ago
Really is a sad story.
Comment icon #5 Posted by Ove 8 days ago
The hard drive doesn't contain the bitcoins. The 8000 bitcoins in question are safe at this address in the bitcoin blockchain 198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5qkfy4g3Hi In order to move the bitcoins to any other address in the bitcoin blockchain, he needs the password (private key) to the said address. It's this password (private key) that's on the hard drive, he's looking for. The password (private key) looks like this 5Kb8kLf9zgWQnogidDA76MzPL6TsZZY36hWXMssSzNydYXYB9KF Anyone who has the right password (private key) can move the bitcoins to any other address in the bitcoin blockchai... [More]
Comment icon #6 Posted by Still Waters 8 days ago
No it doesn't. I don't think that was meant to be taken literally. It's the bitcoin wallet that's in his hard drive.
Comment icon #7 Posted by Ove 8 days ago
Quotes from the approved judgment of the judge https://www.11kbw.com/content/uploads/Howells-v-Newport.pdf "a hard drive containing the private key to his Bitcoin was deposited in error at Docksway Landfill Site, Newport" "the Bitcoin “exist independently on the Blockchain, away from the hard drive" "The position is no different in principle from what it would be if the record of the private key had been written on a piece of paper that had been put into the landfill. If the claimant had a separate record of the private key, he could use the private key to access the Bitcoin" I have se... [More]
Comment icon #8 Posted by Ove 7 days ago
It's funny how he got the bitcoins. He downloaded a program called Bitcoin 0.1.0 pressed Options and Generate Coins. And after that got 50 bitcoins every every 10 minutes, as long as the program was up and running. He knew knew nothing about any private key. He just tested the program a couple of months and forgot all about it for several years. The coins had no value and couldn't be used for anything at the time they were generated in early 2009, but are now worth almost 1 billion dollars (820.000.000 USD a month ago)


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