Man seeks help from NASA experts over lost bitcoins
A UK programmer has been desperately trying for eight years to recover his old hard drive containing a password to a digital wallet. He is now in talks with a company that helped NASA recover data from an exploded space shuttle.
James Howells from South Wales mined bitcoins at the time when it cost almost nothing and the cryptocurrency was known only in narrow tech circles. He managed to accumulate some 7,500 bitcoins – now worth more than $350 million.
A special cryptographic private key for getting access to bitcoins was kept on a hard drive, which was accidentally thrown into the Docksway landfill site near Newport, Wales, in 2013. The man thought the device from his old computer contained nothing but rubbish.
