After 12 years of unsuccessful attempts, the man who has disposed of a hard disk with 770 million dollars in Bitcoin has to give up
The court has issued a final ruling, ending the search for James Howells' extremely valuable laptop hard drive.
Ever tossed something out thinking you didn’t need it anymore, only to regret it later? Happens to the best of us. But for James Howells from Newport, Wales, what he threw away was worth a lot more than an old favorite T-shirt. In 2013, he accidentally tossed out an encrypted hard drive, confusing it with another device. That hard drive held the private key for 8,000 Bitcoin – worth about 600 US dollars at the time. But as the value of Bitcoin skyrocketed, he soon realized he had thrown away roughly 6 million dollars. Yikes!
Did he try to find it?
Yes, of course, he tried to recover the hard drive, which was worth millions by that time, but the problem was it was buried about three to five feet underground at the Docksway landfill in Newport.
Howells made repeated attempts to gain access to the landfill to recover the cryptocurrency. As the value of his missing wallet soared, he assembled a team of experts to locate and recover the hard drive. He also consistently asked Newport City Council for permission to access the site and even offered them a share of the missing Bitcoin if it was found, but he had no luck.
The legal attempt came to nothing
After years of trying to engage with Newport City Council, Howells finally decided to sue them, demanding either access to the landfill or L495 million in compensation (about 600 million dollars). And guess what? In early January 2025, the High Court dismissed his case, ruling that there were no 'reasonable grounds' for the claim and no 'realistic prospect' of winning at trial.
Under current laws, the hard drive became the council's property as soon as it entered the landfill, and environmental permits prevent any attempt to excavate the site, as digging it up could release harmful substances into the environment.
And that's it. That's the end of James Howells' million-dollar hard drive story. It's buried deep underground now, covered in tons of nasty, smelly trash, and there's pretty much nothing he can do about it.
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