Man Hires NASA-Linked Experts to Find Hard Drive With 7,500 Bitcoins Accidently Trashed

The owner of this hard drive has approached Ontrack, a company that recovered a hard drive from crashed NASA shuttle “Columbia” in 2003.

By Radhika Parashar | Updated: 22 December 2021 13:48 IST

Man Hires NASA-Linked Experts to Find Hard Drive With 7,500 Bitcoins Accidently Trashed

Photo Credit: Unsplash/ Aleksi Räisä

Each Bitcoin token is currently trading at $49,255 (roughly Rs. 37.2 lakh)

Highlights

The lost Bitcoins could fetch GBP 340 million (roughly Rs. 3,404 crore)
The hired experts hope the lost hard drive is not cracked
Permissions to search dump yard not attained as yet

James Howells, a 36-year-old man from the UK has hired data experts associated with NASA to help him find an old hard drive that contains 7,500 Bitcoin tokens worth 340 million GBP (Great Britain Pound) or roughly Rs. 3,404 crore. In 2013, a former partner of Howells had accidentally tossed the hard drive into the trash. Howells is trying to recover his Bitcoin tokens which could turn around his fortune and could make him an overnight billionaire.

The resident of South Wales has approached Ontrack, a company that helped NASA find a hard drive from the Columbia space shuttle after it crashed to Earth in 2003.

At the time, Minneapolis, US-based Ontrack had managed to recover 99 percent of the data - despite the hard drive being found in a dried-up lakebed six months after the incident.

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As per a report by news portal Mirror, Ontrack believes there are about 90 percent chances that Howell's Bitcoin data could be obtained if the hard drive has not cracked.

“I have put together a full consortium of experts in the field to refute all of the claims that the council has said it has concerns over. I've spoken to data recovery experts who have worked with NASA on the Columbia space shuttle disaster,” a report by The Sun quoted Howells as saying.

Presently, this search mission has encountered snags from the authorities of Newport, Wales that are not permitting Howells to comb through the rubbish tip in the area.

Howells has also offered a quarter of any fortune found to the Wales authorities, despite which the permissions have not come through as yet.

Bitcoin is the oldest and the most-valued crypto asset by market valuation which is $930,586,172,063 (roughly Rs. 70,33,370 crore) as per CoinMarketCap

Presently, each token of Bitcoin is trading at $49,255 (roughly Rs. 37.2 lakh) on international exchanges.

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Further reading: Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

Radhika Parashar

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Radhika Parashar is a senior correspondent for Gadgets 360. She has been reporting on tech and telecom for the last three years now and will be focussing on writing about all things crypto. Besides this, she is a major sitcom nerd and often replies in Chandler Bing and Michael Scott references. For tips or queries you could reach out to her at RadhikaP@ndtv.com. More