James Howells, a British IT worker and an early investor in Bitcoin, became interested in the cryptocoin economy in 2009, but his girlfriend made him stop dabbling in the industry after he amassed around 7,500 bitcoin, which was worth little to nothing at the time. He has assembled a team of eight experts specializing in areas including AI-powered sorting, landfill excavation, waste management, and data extraction — including one advisor who worked for a company that recovered data from the black box of the crashed Columbia space shuttle. A spokeswoman said: 'Newport City Council has been contacted multiple times since 2013 about the possibility of retrieving a piece of IT hardware said to contain bitcoins, which may or may not be in our landfill site. Howells’s efforts to recover the money had clearly taken a toll on him. Like Poe’s Legrand, he was “infected with misanthropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy.” He had spoken to the press mainly in the hope that it might help him secure his treasure, and he admitted to me that some of his how to sell crypto on cryptocom interviews hadn’t been entirely honest. To throw potential thieves off his trail, he said, he had fudged the number of bitcoins he had mined. (He showed me his bitcoin ledger, confirming that the true number was eight thousand.) When I insisted on confirming information directly with his business associates, he resisted, claiming that I might leak the information to a rival excavation team.