Buried deep in a Welsh landfill, beneath layers of years-old trash, lies a hard drive that could unlock almost $800 million worth of bitcoin – or so James Howells believes, after accidentally discarding the drive in 2013, CNN’s Lianne Kolirin reported this on Friday.
Now, after years of legal battles with the local authority, Howells has a new plan: to buy the landfill.
“I am considering purchasing a landfill site. Funding secured,” he posted Thursday on X, echoing comments he made earlier this week, which were widely covered in the UK media. However, he did not disclose who is backing his funding.
CNN has reached out to Howells for comment.
Howells has made numerous attempts to retrieve the hard drive from the Docksway Landfill in Newport, a city 12 miles (19 kilometers) northeast of Cardiff. In 2021, he even offered Newport City Council more than $70 million for permission to search the site.
His latest move follows a January ruling by a British High Court judge, who dismissed his bid to force the council to allow him to search the landfill.
Howells accidentally threw away the critical hard drive in August 2013 while clearing out his house, mistakenly thinking it was a blank drive with no data. He discarded it in a trash bag that his then-partner took to the landfill. It wasn’t until the value of bitcoin soared that Howells realized he had thrown away the wrong drive.
Since then, the value of the bitcoin he claims is on that hard drive has skyrocketed from around $9 million to nearly $800 million, as cryptocurrency prices surged.
Each bitcoin transaction requires a private key, a secret piece of data that proves ownership. Howells' hard drive contains "a record" of this key, as outlined by Judge Andrew Keyser in his January ruling.
"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 and thrown into the landfill," Keyser wrote.
Without the private key, Howells cannot access the bitcoin he mined years ago, when the cryptocurrency was still a niche technology.
Newport City Council, which plans to close the landfill in the 2025/26 financial year, has not responded to CNN’s request for comment. In 2021, the council told CNN it is not authorized to excavate the site.
"The council has informed Mr. Howells several times that excavation is not possible under our licensing permit, and the excavation itself would have a significant environmental impact on the 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, with no guarantee of finding the hard drive or it being in working order."
Bd-pratidin English/ Jisan