In 2013, James Howells, a British computer technician, made a mistake that would upend his life.

A few years earlier, he had mined thousands of bitcoins while their value was still negligible. The keys needed to access his bitcoins were stored on a hard drive he no longer used.

During a major cleanup, James accidentally threw the disk in the trash. It wasn’t until later that he realized what he had just lost.

The problem? The disk contained the private keys that provided access to approximately 8,000 bitcoins.

As the price of Bitcoin skyrocketed, the potential value of his bitcoins reached hundreds of millions, and then several billion dollars.

James then began a long battle to get his disk back from a public landfill in Newport, in the United Kingdom. He proposed costly search operations, using specialists and cutting-edge technologies in particular.

But local authorities refused, notably for environmental and safety reasons.

Since then, his story has become one of the most famous examples of lost digital fortune.

All that’s missing for him to reclaim this fortune is one thing: to find the disk… and, above all, to still be able to read the keys it contains.