British IT specialist to buy robot dogs to find lost bitcoins

An IT specialist from the United Kingdom has announced his plans to purchase robot dogs to search for 7, 500 bitcoins lost in 2013.

As it became known, James Howells hopes to find his hard drive from an old computer that he threw into a landfill in 2013. Howells plans to buy two robot dogs, worth $ 75,000 each, from the American company Boston Dynamics. Without taking into account other possible costs, the search for lost BTC will cost the IT specialist 0.1% of the total value of his cryptocurrency — at the time of writing, about $ 160 million in BTC is lost.

It is worth emphasizing that not everyone believes in Howells' idea, some members of the crypto community criticize the IT specialist, not understanding how he will be able to «find a needle in a haystack.» In fact, it is not known what condition the hard disk might be in after being at the bottom of a landfill for 9 years and whether someone took it before Howells.

As a reminder, in late June, a white hacker traveled from Portland to Seattle to potentially recover «millions of dollars» in bitcoins from a Samsung Galaxy SIII phone belonging to a local bus operator. The company had inexplicably acquired BTC in July 2016 by paying a man in a café in cash and storing the cryptocurrency in a wallet on the phone. Access to the wallet was subsequently lost.

After some microprocessing, memory downloading, and detecting Samsung’s access pattern, the hacker regained access to the MyCelium wallet and found only 0.300,861 BTC, which is now $ 64.