A COMPUTER engineer who claims to have accidentally thrown away a hard drive with more than £350million worth of Bitcoin on it has recruited NASA data experts to help him find his fortune.

James Howells, 35, says the hard drive from his old laptop contains £342million worth of Bitcoin, but the local council in Newport, south Wales, have refused to help him despite offering to give them a quarter of the fortune.

Howells says he chucked out the hard drive in the summer of 2013 when he was clearing out his desk.

He said: “I had two identical hard drives and I threw out the wrong one

“I have to laugh about it now.”

He believes even after all these years the hard drive would still be in working order.

“The outside case might be rusted but the inside disk, where the data is stored – there should be a good chance that it still works,” he added.

Howells had known about Bitcoin since 2008 when he’d learned about it in an online forum.

Bitcoin, which worked by linking individual computers together to form a vast, secure network, appealed to him immediately.

Howells downloaded free software that made it possible to acquire Bitcoin and set his laptop to spend overnight “mining”.

The first time he mined the cryptocurrency, Howells’s computer was one of only five on the network.

He said: “I know this because when you’re in a Bitcoin network it tells you, on the bottom right, ‘You are connected to x amount of nodes,’ or machines.”

He mined Bitcoin at night, off and on, for a couple of months but the process caused the laptop to overheat and the computer’s fan began to irritate his partner at the time so he decided to stop.

By the time Howells ended mining, he had accumulated 8,000 coins.

Howells has contacted engineers, environmentalists and data recovery experts from around the world in his bid to recover the lost Bitcoin.

And now he’s recruited Ontrack, the data-recovery firm which salvaged the hard drive from the Columbia space shuttle after it plunged to Earth in 2003.

The company from Minneapolis, hired by NASA, managed to recover 99 per cent of the data and believe there is a 80 to 90 per cent chance of his fortune being recovered.

He said: “I have put together a full consortium of experts in the field to refute all of the claims that the council has said it has concerns over.

“I’ve spoken to data recovery experts who have worked with NASA on the Columbia space shuttle disaster.

“They were able to recover from a shuttle that exploded and they don’t seem to think that being at a landfill will be a problem.”

“The current valuation is £342million but around a week ago it was at its peak of £420million,” he said.

“That’s a lot of Bitcoin just sat there in the ground and I have no doubt whatsoever that in the next year it’s going to be worth, £550million, £600million, or even £700million.

“It could be the case that the hard drive is worth a billion dollars and failing to act on it will be incompetence on behalf of the council. It’s not a problem that’s going to go away.”

He added: “The council say they worry about who will meet the cost if it’s not recoverable but all of that would be part of a signed contract.

“I’m asking them for a three month feasibility study so we could sit down outline our plans and they could put forward their concerns and we can answer them, but they won’t give me that.”

In May, Howells had a meeting with two city officials, but one of the officials told him: “You know, Mr. Howells, there is absolutely zero appetite for this project to go ahead within Newport City Council.”

A spokeswoman for the council said: “Newport city council has been contacted a number of times since 2014 about the possibility of retrieving a piece of IT hardware said to contain bitcoins.

“The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds – without any guarantee of either finding it or it still being in working order.

“The council has also told Mr Howells on a number of occasions that excavation is not possible under our licensing permit and excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area. We have, therefore, been clear that we cannot assist him in this matter.”