The nice thing about cryptocurrencies is that you can store them yourself. You don’t need a couch and you can keep them wherever you want. But that’s a problem at the same time: if you’ve lost it, you’ve really lost it. But the British James Howells is not satisfied with this. He has started a major search for 8,000 bitcoins.
High-tech bitcoin treasure hunting
The IT specialist from Newport, Whales had no less than 8,000 bitcoin (BTC) on a hard drive in 2013. But he had a second, identical hard drive that had nothing on it. He decided to throw away the empty one, but he accidentally threw away the hard drive with all the bitcoins. The hard drive probably ended up in a garbage dump.
He went to a lot of trouble with the local council for permission to search the landfill. He did not get this for a long time, because it would be too expensive and too harmful to the environment. But last year he got help from a hedge fund, which he promised a share of the proceeds if the hard drive was found.
Together with this fund, permission from the government and his knowledge of technology, he has now managed to search for the hard disk in a smart way. So high-tech treasure hunting. On Business Insider he explains that in addition to humans, they will also use robot dogs and even computer models based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to find the hard drive.
He has come up with two options. The most comprehensive version costs no less than 11 million dollars and involves searching 100 million kilograms of waste. It is not clear how long this should take. The less comprehensive option could cost him $6 million and he estimates a required search time of 18 months. He’s even hired security guards to keep people from going treasure hunting on their own.
Pay close attention to your BTC wallet
Wallets are clearly not always convenient. If you does not make backups and only have one wallet, then that is just as risky as putting all your money in one investment. Chainalysis thinks a whopping 3.72 million bitcoins are lost forever.
For the police, cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin are ideal, because it is relatively easy to track down criminals. That is why there are regular criminals whose coins are confiscated. But sometimes the police have the hardware wallet, but cannot access it because it is the private keys has not. That is how the German police had their noses at a large amount of crypto last year. Yet this was of no use.
