Buried deep in a Welsh landfill, beneath layers of years-old garbage, there is a hard drive that holds the key to almost $800 million in bitcoin – or so James Howells believes, after accidentally throwing the drive away in 2013.
And now, after years of battling the local authority in court to retrieve the hard drive, Howells has come up with a new plan: to simply buy the landfill.
“Am considering purchasing a landfill site. Funding secured,” he wrote Thursday on X, echoing comments by him that were widely reported in the UK media on Monday, though he didn’t say who was providing the funding.
Howells has tried almost everything to access the Docksway Landfill in Newport, a city 12 miles (19 kilometers) northeast of the Welsh capital, Cardiff, including offering Newport City Council more than $70 million in 2021 for permission to dig up the site.
His latest plan comes after a British High Court judge stopped his case from going to trial, issuing a judgment in January that dismissed his attempts to force the council to allow him to search the landfill.
Howells accidentally threw out that crucial hard drive in August 2013 when he was clearing out his house, thinking it was a blank drive that contained no data. He put it in a trash bag that he left in the hallway for his then-partner to take to the garbage dump, before he realised, as the value of the bitcoin rose, that he had disposed of the wrong one.
Since then, the value of the bitcoin Howells says is loaded onto the hard drive has skyrocketed from around $9 million to almost $800 million, as prices of cryptocurrency have soared in recent years.
Every bitcoin transaction requires a private key, a secret piece of data contained within each individual bitcoin wallet that mathematically proves the transaction has come from that wallet.
Howells’ hard drive contains “a record” of that private key, Judge Andrew Keyser wrote in his judgement issued in January.
“The position is no different in principle from what it would be if the record of the private key had been written on a piece of paper that had been put into the landfill,” Keyser added.
Without knowing the private key, Howells can’t access the bitcoin he mined all those years ago, when the cryptocurrency was little known beyond the tech world.
“The council has told Mr Howells on a number of occasions that excavation is not possible under our licencing permit and excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area,” a spokeswoman said at the time.
“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.”