Bitcoin Lost In The Dump James Howells

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James Howells

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.

This exchange or platform is based in United Kingdom, or the incident targeted people primarily in United Kingdom.

About None

"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."

This exchange or platform is based in United Kingdom, or the incident targeted people primarily in United Kingdom.

The background of the exchange platform, service, or individuals involved, as it would have been seen or understood at the time of the events.

Include:

• Known history of when and how the service was started.
• What problems does the company or service claim to solve?
• What marketing materials were used by the firm or business?
• Audits performed, and excerpts that may have been included.
• Business registration documents shown (fake or legitimate).
• How were people recruited to participate?
• Public warnings and announcements prior to the event.

Don't Include:

• Any wording which directly states or implies that the business is/was illegitimate, or that a vulnerability existed.
• Anything that wasn't reasonably knowable at the time of the event.

There could be more than one section here. If the same platform is involved with multiple incidents, then it can be linked to a main article page.

The Reality

This sections is included if a case involved deception or information that was unknown at the time. Examples include:

• When the service was actually started (if different than the "official story").
• Who actually ran a service and their own personal history.
• How the service was structured behind the scenes. (For example, there was no "trading bot".)
• Details of what audits reported and how vulnerabilities were missed during auditing.

What Happened

The specific events of the loss and how it came about. What actually happened to cause the loss and some of the events leading up to it.

Key Event Timeline - Bitcoin Lost In The Dump James Howells

Date	Event	Description
August, 2013	Hard Drive Chucked	James Howells decides to discard the old hard drive with bitcoin on it.

Technical Details

This section includes specific detailed technical analysis of any security breaches which happened. What specific software vulnerabilities contributed to the problem and how were they exploited?

Total Amount Lost

The total amount lost has been estimated at $872,000 USD.

How much was lost and how was it calculated? If there are conflicting reports, which are accurate and where does the discrepancy lie?

Immediate Reactions

How did the various parties involved (firm, platform, management, and/or affected individual(s)) deal with the events? Were services shut down? Were announcements made? Were groups formed?

Ultimate Outcome

What was the end result? Was any investigation done? Were any individuals prosecuted? Was there a lawsuit? Was any tracing done?

Total Amount Recovered

There do not appear to have been any funds recovered in this case.

What funds were recovered? What funds were reimbursed for those affected users?

Ongoing Developments

What parts of this case are still remaining to be concluded?

Individual Prevention Policies

No specific policies for individual prevention have yet been identified in this case.

For the full list of how to protect your funds as an individual, check our Prevention Policies for Individuals guide.

Platform Prevention Policies

Policies for platforms to take to prevent this situation have not yet been selected in this case.

For the full list of how to protect your funds as a financial service, check our Prevention Policies for Platforms guide.

Regulatory Prevention Policies

No specific regulatory policies have yet been identified in this case.

For the full list of regulatory policies that can prevent loss, check our Prevention Policies for Regulators guide.