James Howells thinks that a hard drive that holds the key to almost $800 million in bitcoin is buried deep in a Welsh landfill, under layers of years-old trash. He thinks this because he accidentally threw away the drive in 2013.
After going to court for years to get the local government to give back the hard drive, Howells has now come up with a new plan: he is going to buy the dump.
“I’m thinking about buying a landfill site.” “Funding secured,” he wrote on X on Thursday, repeating comments he made on Monday that were widely covered in the UK media. He didn’t say who was giving him the money, though.
Howells has done almost everything to get to the Docksway Landfill in Newport, which is 12 miles (19 kilometers) northeast of Cardiff, the capital of Wales. In 2021, he offered more than $70 million to the city council of Newport to dig up the site.
Before his new plan, a British High Court judge stopped his case from going to trial. In January, the judge threw out his efforts to force the council to let him search the landfill.
Howells threw away that important hard drive by mistake in August 2013 when he was cleaning out his house. He thought it was a blank drive with no data on it. He put it in a trash bag and left it in the hallway for his partner at the time to take to the dump. It wasn’t until the bitcoin’s value went up that he realized he had thrown away the wrong one.
Since then, the bitcoin that Howells says is on the hard drive has gone from being worth about $9 million to being worth almost $800 million. This is because the price of bitcoin has gone through the roof in recent years.
A private key is a secret piece of information that is kept in each bitcoin wallet and is needed for every transaction. It mathematically shows that the transaction came from that wallet.
Judge Andrew Keyser wrote in his January ruling that Howells’ hard drive has “a record” of that secret key.
“In a broad sense, the situation is the same as if the private key record had been written on a piece of paper that had been thrown away,” Keyser said.
Howells can’t get to the bitcoin he mined years ago, when the cryptocurrency wasn’t well known outside of the tech world, because he doesn’t have the secret key.
Local media say that Newport City Council plans to close the landfill sometime in the 2025–26 fiscal year. The council has not yet replied to CNN’s request for comment. In 2021, it told CNN that digging at the spot is not allowed.
A spokesperson at the time said, “The council has told Mr. Howells on a number of occasions that excavation is not possible under our licensing permit and that excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area.”
“The cost of digging up the landfill, storing it, and treating the trash could reach millions of pounds, and there’s no guarantee that it will be found or that it will still work.”
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