Imagine you own nearly $800 million in Bitcoin and one day you accidentally threw away a hard drive containing the necessary information you need to access your million. That’s what happened to a British man named James Howells. Now Howells is still trying to find his hard drive, and he thinks it in a landfill. So Howells’ solution? Buy the landfill.
“Am considering purchasing a landfill site. Funding secured,” Howells wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Feb. 13. However, he did not reveal the identity of his backers.
A Costly Oops!
Howells has spent years trying to retrieve the hard drive, which he tossed in 2013 while clearing out his house, thinking it was a blank drive. The drive, he believes, holds the private key to his Bitcoin fortune, which has ballooned from around $9 million in 2013 to almost $800 million due to the surge in cryptocurrency prices.
“One evening in the summer of 2013, I decided to do a clearout of all the old equipment in my office. And unfortunately, in a case of mistaken identity, the wrong hard drive was placed into the bin bag,” he recalled during a recent interview with NPR. The hard drive, which he threw away thinking it was empty, contained a 51-character key that would give him access to his Bitcoin.
Years later, after reading about someone using Bitcoin profits to buy a penthouse, Howells realized his mistake. “I was rechecking the price every day, and there was an extra million added on every day. So that kind of added to the panic,” he said.
Despite numerous attempts to gain access to the landfill, Newport City Council has consistently denied his requests. “The council has 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,” a council spokeswoman stated in 2021.
Howells had been fighting in court to get access to search the Docksway Landfill in Newport, Wales. But recently a British High Court judge ruled in January that his case could not proceed. In 2021, Howells offered the Newport City Council $70 million to grant him permission to excavate the site, but his request was denied.
Howells, undeterred, has hired a team of experts ready to excavate the site. “I would like to turn South Wales into a crypto hub and basically make crypto the next sort of industry that is powering South Wales forward,” he shared. “Because at the moment, this local area is dying.”
Even if the hard drive is found, there is no guarantee that it will be in working order. “Obviously, the outside case will be rusted, damaged, dented, etc., but the data isn’t stored on the outside of the hard drive. It’s stored on a mini disk inside the hard drive,” Howells explained.
Despite Newport City Council having rejected his offers to purchase the landfill so far, since there are plans to close the landfill site sometime in the 2025/26 financial year, Howells says he is hopeful that then they will allow him to buy the space — and hopefully find his valuable hard drive.
