Bitcoin expert says man who accidentally binned £569 million jackpot could be recovered with ‘key’ words

A bloke who lost his Bitcoin and says he's got a buried fortune just waiting to be recovered, might be able to get it back some other way, according to an expert.

James Howells claims he had about 8,000 Bitcoin on a hard drive, which his former partner accidentally threw out while he was clearing out his office.

She's since said it wasn't her fault as he asked her to throw away his rubbish and the bin bag with the Bitcoin had been put with them.

Since realising the mistake, he's been trying to get Newport City Council to let him dig his hard drive out of the landfill site he says it's buried in, and has actually sued them in an attempt to get the green light to go mining for Bitcoin.

He reckons he knows exactly where the hard drive is, though it's been over a decade since it was thrown away, so whether or not it's in any condition to be usable again is anybody's guess.

James Howells lost his Bitcoin when his hard drive was thrown away during an office clearout. (BBC)

With the value of Bitcoin climbing the amount his treasure trove is worth keeps increasing and it's now worth somewhere in the region of £569 million, so you can understand why he'd want to have it back.

The council has said an excavation of the site is 'not possible' and warned that letting Howells dig up the landfill site would have a 'huge environmental impact'.

Howells previously offered the local area 25 percent of the Bitcoin treasure to fund community projects, which he later reduced to 10 percent as he gathered investors to back his attempts to recover the hard drive.

However, he might not have to go digging according to a cryptocurrency expert who said there might be another way for him to recover his funds.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Hadyn Jones said that if Howells still had the 'seed phrase' for his Bitcoin wallet then he might be able to get the 'key' back.

Howells apparently has about 8,000 Bitcoin, which would make him very rich if he could recover it. (Getty Stock Photo)

That's rather the crucial thing here, the 'key' is on the hard drive and if he has some record or memory of the 'seed phrase', a series of random words, then Howells might be able to get back in.

Jones explained: "So, as long as he has that, he is quids in. If he doesn't, it's sayōnara."

He added that without the key or the seed phrase it would be 'computably infeasible' to get into the cryptocurrency wallet, so you'd hope that Howells has written it down somewhere and just didn't know that these random words might hold the key to his forgotten fortune.

Sadly for Howells, cryptocurrency investigator Paul Sibenik told the Mail there might not even be a seed phrase, which would mean that unless he can find the hard drive with the original key on it he's screwed.

He said that the Bitcoin would be 'inaccessible forever' without the hard drive, so it'd seem like plan A of trying to get permission to dig it out is still his best bet.