In the meanders of current events, incredible stories can sometimes be hidden, like that of James Howells, an ordinary man embarked on an extraordinary adventure in search of a digital treasure that he himself had mislaid.
You've probably already heard of this nugget of a story: James Howells, our treasure hunter in spite of himself, and his epic quest to find a hard drive containing no less than 8,000 bitcoins!
In August 2013, while teleworking from his cocoon in Newport, Wales, James, a software engineer by trade, embarked on a major spring clean... in summer.
While sorting through his junk, he came across two hard drives. A quick reflex and the wrong drive - the one that wasn't supposed to be the wrong one - ends up in the bin. It was only in the middle of the night, in a flash of genius (or panic), that he realised his mistake. Unfortunately, his wife, who was as early as she was efficient, had already sent the whole thing to the dump.
The final straw came a few months later, when bitcoin began to sparkle on the market. That's when James recalls his glory days as a crypto pioneer, having mined those famous 8,000 bitcoins long before it became cool. Back then, bitcoin was more of a hobby than a gold investment.
But back to our lost hard drive: this little treasure containing the key to James's fortune lies somewhere in a huge landfill site in Newport. Despite his tireless efforts and a €10 million fund-raising campaign this year to finance a search operation worthy of an adventure film, our hero still hasn't managed to get his hands on it.
James' latest idea? To call on the Max-AI company to develop robots with artificial intelligence, like Spot, but with a robotic arm, to search the landfill. It remains to be seen whether the landfill will give the go-ahead and whether our modern-day adventurer will find his precious hard drive... before bitcoin does another one of its famous antics!
How far would you go to find a lost digital treasure? Stay tuned for the rest of this incredible treasure hunt!
