James Howells’ plan is thought out down to the smallest detail, or at least that’s what he will try to demonstrate to the Newport City Council (UK). A plan which would theoretically cost 11 million dollars and which would involve the use of robot dogs. The 36-year-old Welshman intends to convince his audience with a project worthy of the greatest science fiction films.
Its goal ? Find a hard drive thrown into the city’s public dump in the middle of nearly 110,000 tons of waste. A book-sized object with an estimated value (at the time of writing this article) of 180 million euros.
A state-of-the-art project
Part of this funding will be used to purchase two Spot robot dogs from Boston Dynamics. In this project, they would first intervene to ensure security around the excavation site, thus avoiding clandestine excavations, and secondly to scan the dump in order to search for the hard drive. To optimize everything, one of these robots will be in operation while the other is in charge.
In reference to the crypto world, the two robot dogs would be named “Satoshi” and “Hal”. Satoshi referring to the use name of the creators of Bitcoin and Hal referring to “Hal Finney” the engineer who received the first bitcoin via a transfer.
To carry out this project, James Howells also assembled a team of eight experts in very specific fields such as AI, data mining, waste extraction and landfill research.
Its success is not guaranteed.
As a reminder, in 2009, James Howells mined nearly 8,000 bitcoins, which he then transferred to one of his hard drives. Unfortunately, in 2013, this same hard drive was inadvertently thrown in the trash.
In the event that his plan works and he finds his hard drive, it will also be necessary to count on the fact that the platter of the latter is not broken. If so far all the conditions are met, the Welshman has between 10 and 20% chance that the data will not be recoverable; figures validated by data recovery specialists. A real obstacle course awaits him.
Source : Business Insider
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