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"Howells had known about bitcoin from the start. [S]hortly after the cryptocurrency was developed, he’d learned about it in an online forum. The Bitcoin system, which operated by linking individual computers together to form a vast, secure network, appealed to him immediately."

"Howells read Nakamoto’s proposal soon after it was posted. He was already skeptical of power and those who had it. The neoliberal years had not been good for Howells’s generation in Wales: the coal mines had closed, reducing trade at the port, and Newport lacked jobs in other industries. “The elders own all the property,” Howells told me. “People of my generation just leave.” The bailout of big banks after the 2008 crash taught him that “the dollar, the euro, and the pound are scams—the whole system is a sham.” He was an ideal apostle for the techno-utopianism of the Bitcoin system. “Me and Satoshi in 2009 both had the same vision,” Howells said."

"The first time he mined, Howells’s computer was one of only five on the network. He told me, “I know this because when you’re in a Bitcoin network it tells you, on the bottom right, ‘You are connected to x amount of nodes,’ or machines.” He mined at night, off and on, for a couple of months. But the mining took a lot of processing power, causing the laptop to overheat. The computer’s whirring fan began to irritate Hafina, and he decided to stop. “It wasn’t worth putting up a fight,” he remembers. The coins had no value at the time, and there was no reason to think that they ever would. “It was just mining for fun,” he said. “It was an experiment.” The electricity required to keep his computer going had cost him about ten pounds." "By the time Howells ended his mining project, he had accumulated eight thousand coins"

"Howells threw himself into other side projects. The son of a carpenter, he was handy. For his children, he turned an upstairs room into an elaborate replica of Minecraft, the video game. The kids loved it, he told me."

"Half a year later, the spilled lemonade destroyed his gaming laptop. He transferred some of the hard drive’s contents to a new iMac, but he did not bother with the bitcoin folder. “There was no Bitcoin version on Apple at the time, so there was no reason,” he recalls. He then extracted the hard drive and put it in the desk drawer."

"The decisive moment, he now thinks, occurred one evening in August, 2013, when he was twenty-eight and at home with his family in Newport, a small city on the Welsh coast. Howells and his partner, Hafina, were raising three children, and family trips—like the one that they had taken to Disneyland Paris—were fun but exhausting. So he had made plans to treat himself to what he called a “lads’ vacation”: a trip with friends to a resort in Cyprus. Howells, an engineer who helped maintain emergency-response systems for various communities in Wales, often worked from home, and that night he decided to neaten up his office. As he recently recalled to me, “The thought process was: I’m going to be drinking every day. I don’t want to be on a hangover and cleaning this mess up when I get back.”"

"In a cluttered desk drawer, he found two small hard drives. One, he knew, was blank. The other held files from an old Dell gaming laptop, including e-mails, music that he’d downloaded, and duplicates of family photographs. He’d removed the drive a few years earlier, after he’d spilled lemonade on the computer’s keyboard. Howells grabbed the unwanted hard drive and threw it into a black garbage bag."

"Later, when the couple slid into bed, Howells asked Hafina, who dropped off their kids at day care each morning, if she would mind taking the trash to the dump also. He remembers her declining, saying, “It’s not my fucking job—it’s your job.” Howells conceded the point. As his head hit the pillow, he recalls, he made a mental note to remove the hard drive from the bag. “I’m a systems engineer,” he said. “I’ve never thrown a hard drive in the bin. It’s just a bad idea.”

The next day, Hafina got up early and took the garbage to the landfill after all. Howells remembers waking upon her return, at around nine. “Ah, did you take the bag to the tip?” he asked. He told himself, “Oh, fuck—she’s chucked it,” but he was still groggy, and he soon fell back asleep."

"While clearing out some junk from his home, Howells, 37, [had] accidentally thr[own] out [the] hard drive containing around 8,000 bitcoins that he had mined during the early stages of the cryptocurrency’s development."

"[W]hen Howells [finally] had his uh-oh moment, his hard drive was already buried under other people’s trash. He wanted to go to the dump, but he was embarrassed—and afraid that nobody would believe his story. “Explaining Bitcoin at the time was not easy,” he recalls. So for about a month he told no one, and watched helplessly as the bitcoin market soared, and with it the value of his lost holdings. He remembers saying to himself, “Oh, shit—this is turning into a bigger and bigger mistake.” Around the time that his bitcoin became worth six million dollars, he confessed to Hafina. She was shocked to learn of the potential windfall, and encouraged him to go to the dump to see if anything could be done. When he told the manager there that he’d accidentally thrown away about four million pounds, he got a lot of head shakes, but eventually the manager took him to an elevated spot to survey the site: the mounds of churned earth, the depot where trash was mixed with soil, the grassed-over areas of retired landfill. Howells’s heart sank: he saw ten to fifteen soccer pitches’ worth of garbage. How could he possibly sift through it all?"

"[H]e’s petitioning his city to allow him to dig up the local landfill in a bid to retrieve the nearly decade-old hard drive, and is promising to share the profits."

“We’d like to set up a community-owned (bitcoin) mining facility which is using that clean electricity to create bitcoin for the people of Newport.”

Howells also proposes to give £50 (about $78) worth of bitcoin to every resident of Newport and install cryptocurrency terminals in all local shops.

Despite these incentives, the City of Newport has not budged to allow Howells search, saying it would pose an ecological risk to the community.

Newport council owns the landfill and has said it has repeatedly denied Howells’ requests to excavate the site since 2013.

“We have statutory duties which we must carry out in managing the landfill site,” a spokesman for the council told the BBC. “Part of this is managing the ecological risk to the site and the wider area. Mr. Howells’ proposals pose significant ecological risk which we cannot accept, and indeed are prevented from considering by the terms of our permit.”

"Howells said: “Digging up a landfill is a huge operation in itself.” “The funding has been secured. We’ve brought on an AI specialist. Their technology can easily be retrained to search for a hard drive,” Howells told the BBC.

“We’ve also got an environmental team on board. We’ve basically got a well-rounded team of various experts, with various expertise, which, when we all come together, are capable of completing this task to a very high standard.”

"Howells believes the search will take about nine to 12 months, however, even if he does get permission from the council, there is no guarantee the hunt will be successful or that the bitcoins he mined all those years ago will be recoverable from the hard drive."

Explore This Case Further On Our Wiki

James Howells found bitcoin in 2008 and was one of the first miners on the network. He accumulated over 8000 bitcoin on an old hard drive, and kept no backups. One day while cleaning up, he threw out the hard drive. He now desires to excavate the whole city dump in order to find it. Maybe one day he will convince the city to allow him, and retrieve the data. If not, this situation may be a perpetual lure for future treasure hunters.

Half a Billion in Bitcoin, Lost in the Dump | The New Yorker (Oct 8)
Man seeks to search landfill for lost $235M in Bitcoin using robot dogs, AI - National | Globalnews.ca (Jul 20)
@howelzy Twitter (Jul 20)
Bitcoin: Missing hard drive could fund Newport crypto hub - BBC News (Jul 20)
Man who threw away £150m in bitcoin hopes AI and robot dogs will get it back | Bitcoin | The Guardian (Jul 20)
Computer engineer who accidentally threw away £149m in Bitcoin is plotting £10m hunt for hard drive | Daily Mail Online (Jul 20)
A Hard Drive Contains 7.500 Bitcoins Was Wasted In 2013, Now James Howells Digs A Garbage Dump (Jul 20)
James Howells Lost $181M Bitcoin in Dump: the $11M Plan to Get It Back (Jul 20)
Man who ‘threw away’ bitcoin haul now worth over $80m wants to dig up landfill site | The Independent | The Independent (Jul 20)
James Howells Considers Digging Up Landfill to Find Lost Bitcoin (Jul 20)

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