It all began in 2009 when James Howell obtained bitcoins through mining. Back then the IT worker managed to mine 8,000 BTC when its value was barely above $0.

The price of bitcoin then soared in 2013, hitting an all-time high of $1,100 before closing the year 85% lower than its peak. This is when an unfortunate event struck Howell. He mistakenly threw away the hard disk that contains the passcode for a wallet that has 8,000 bitcoin in it.

Ever since then, Howell has been planning to retrieve it by digging up his city’s landfill but his requests have been denied multiple times by Newport’s city council due to the reason that his plans will create environmental risks which have been countered by Howell’s statement that he and his team will make sure to do their best to minimize it.

In a recent interview, Howell told BBC that he has secured the funding for the digging-up operation. He even mentioned that an AI specialist and a team of environmentalist experts are already on board with him.

“We’ve basically got a well-rounded team of various experts, with various expertise, which, when we all come together, are capable of completing this task to a very high standard,” he said in regards to his belief that the operation will be tedious and will take about three years.

His plan consists of utilizing Boston Dynamics robot dogs to search the landfill alongside with human sorters and AI-powered scanners.

According to Blockchain News, the two investors, Hanspeter Jaberg and Karl Wendeborn won’t sign the $11 million capital funding deal for to the project before Howell secures the approval to dig up the site.

“It is obviously a needle in the haystack, and it’s a very, very high-risk investment,” stated Jaberg. With that being said, there is still a risk that the hard drive is badly damaged to the point that it won’t be possible to extract the data on it. But if the disk that holds the data is not broken, there’s an 80-90% chance that the data could still be salvaged.

Upon retrieving those lost 8,000 bitcoins, which are valued at around $169 million in today’s market, Howell promised to give 30% of the funds to the investors, give every member of the team their shares, and send £50 in bitcoin to every one of the 150,000 Newport residents.

Furthermore, he emphasized the need to restore and clean up the landfill after the team finds the hard drive, even going as far as building a power generation facility that will use wind turbines. He also mentioned that he would love to build a bitcoin mining facility that will be owned by the community of Newport using the power generation facility that would serve as a clean power source. These promises will be included in his next proposal to the City’s council that will be presented in a few weeks.