UK Man Lost $960M Of Bitcoin To A Landfill – Here's His Latest Plan To Get It Back
It's never fun losing money, yet for many folks, it's bound to happen in one way or another. Maybe you made a purchase that didn't pan out — like one of the home gadgets and appliances that are complete wastes of money — or a bet that didn't pay off. You may just misplace some loose dollar bills that would've been nice to have. In any case, one can only hope that the money they've lost wasn't sorely needed, or that it was an acceptably small amount. Meanwhile, there are those unfortunate few like Welsh computer scientist James Howells, who accidentally lost approximately $960 million in Bitcoin in a landfill.
This tragic misstep dates back to 2013, when Howells was working as an IT technician in Newport, Wales. This was when he accidentally tossed a hard drive that contained private keys to 8,000 Bitcoins, which were worth approximately $8 million at the time. Bitcoin's later rise in value made Howells realize the significance of this mistake, so he made it his mission to retrieve the hard drive. This has involved rigorous and extensive legal back-and-forth over the years as he has attempted to get clearance to excavate the landfill he believes the hard drive has resided in since 2013. All while his Bitcoin has climbed in value exponentially.
Howells' attempts to dig up the landfill and find the hard drive have been shut down by the courts, but he hasn't given up hope. He's now turning to digital means to hopefully get his Bitcoin back.
Howells hopes to go beyond his hard drive to get his millions back
A lot of time has passed since James Howells' hard drive ended up in a landfill, all now-$960 million worth of Bitcoins with it. Try as he might to convince Newport, Wales' local council to allow him to excavate, complete with environmentally-conscious tools like contamination monitors, robotic systems for precision digging, and more, it was all to no avail. In 2024, a British judge ruled that recovery attempts simply aren't worth the time, money, and effort. At this point, the hard drive has likely deteriorated to the point that it would likely be unusable even if it were found.
While that may sound like the end of Howells' journey, he's not ready to throw in the towel yet on the Bitcoins he still legally owns. Instead of looking for the physical drive, he now wants to use alternative channels to tokenize his lost 8,000 Bitcoins and get his money back. The new Bitcoin Layer 2 smart token named Ceiniog Coin (INI) is the key here, with Howells hoping to utilize a network update to, as he told The Block, "bootstrap the Ceiniog ecosystem and launch a successful high-speed, high-scale, fast-confirmation, payment-focused web3 environment secured by the Bitcoin blockchain and backed by 8,000 BTC." All of this for Bitcoins, a currency no one even knows the creator of.
It's hard to blame Howells for working so hard to get his Bitcoins back. $960 million is no small amount of money, and one can only hope that he'll find the right means to get it all back, making his efforts up to this point worth the struggle.