Imagine believing you know the location of a hard drive containing over $700 million in Bitcoin. What lengths would you go to recover it? James Howells, a British IT professional who once mined a significant amount of this cryptocurrency, accidentally discarded the hard drive holding his access key. Now, he’s contemplating purchasing the entire land area where he suspects the drive is buried, just to attempt recovery, as reported by The Guardian.

If James Howells rings a bell, it’s likely because he has been in the news for several years. In 2013, he publicly disclosed that he had lost access to 7,500 Bitcoins he mined back in 2009 when the cryptocurrency was virtually worthless. At that time, his holdings were valued at around $7 million, but their value has skyrocketed since then, intensifying Howells’ drive—pun intended—to reclaim his lost asset.

Howells believes he has a reasonable idea of the hard drive’s location—considering the challenges of pinpointing such a tiny object amid a landfill. He suspects it is buried within a dump managed by the city of Newport, South Wales. After assessing the circumstances of its disposal, he conjectures that the hard drive is located in a specific area of the landfill, which contains more than 15,000 metric tons of refuse. City officials have informed Howells that if the hard drive is indeed there, it may be “buried under 25,000 cubic meters of waste and earth.” As the landfill nears capacity, he is eager to purchase the site to initiate his search.

Since first highlighting his dilemma, Howells has consistently come up with various outlandish proposals to retrieve his hard drive. In 2017, he asked Newport’s city authorities for permission to excavate the area. However, the city declined, citing safety issues and the potential influx of treasure hunters eager to join the world’s largest dumpster diving expedition. In 2021, Howells attempted another strategy by offering the city 25% of any profits if he successfully located the hard drive. Newport rejected this offer once more, maintaining their refusal to allow excavations at the site.

In 2022, faced with continued restrictions, Howells proposed using robotic dogs from Boston Dynamics for the excavation work. This plan was part of an ambitious $11 million business model that included a three-year timeline for searching the landfill while also transforming the site into a mining facility. However, Newport was not interested in that concept either.

With the city clearly uninterested in assisting him, Howells has shifted to a confrontational approach, threatening to sue the Newport city council for permission to search for the hard drive. His attempt faced a setback earlier this year when a judge ruled that his case had “no realistic prospect of success” if it proceeded.

Currently, Howells plans to attempt to buy the landfill from the city, which has announced intentions to close and cap the site permanently. There’s no indication that Newport would actually support this plan; capping the landfill does not eliminate the ecological risks associated with excavating it, and city officials might refuse simply out of resistance at this point.

While it’s worth acknowledging Howells’ unwavering commitment to this quest, it’s uncertain whether he will ever recover the hard drive, or even if it will function if found. Yet there’s no indication that devotion and annoyance cannot coexist in his quest.