James Howells lost a hard drive containing the keys to 8,000 Bitcoin in 2013, which is currently valued at approximately $774 million. Now 12 years later, the computer engineer is looking to purchase the dump he believes the hard drive to be buried in, since the site is shutting down.
The local council of Newport, Wales is expected to close the landfill site on Docks Way in the 2025-26 financial year, according to the council’s draft budget, as the dump is nearly at capacity. With this closure, a solar farm is expected to be built on the land in order to power bin collection trucks.
Hearing this news, Howells told Decrypt he is “extremely serious” about purchasing the site.
“My recovery team is still in place, my business partners are still in place, and we would be ready to go tomorrow morning if Newport City Council were willing to discuss and negotiate with us,” he explained.
Howells explained to Decrypt that he has a 5-year plan that involves the purchasing, operating, and excavation of the landfill site. He says he has accurate estimations of how much the entire process would cost—but isn’t willing to state this publicly at this point.
An employee from a homeware store that neighbours the dump told Decrypt that the area stinks all year round anyway, so they aren’t concerned about Howells coming searching the site for his Bitcoin. In fact, they wished him “good luck” as it’ll cost the Newport resident a lot of time and money.
Newport City Council told Decrypt that it is making no further comment.
“If we are willing to search every single piece of hay, eventually we will find the needle,” he said. “The AI object detection systems we intend to use, coupled with manual human sorting mechanisms that are tried and tested, I feel we are in a very good position to be able to identify the HDD amongst the waste material.”
By closing the site, the council is expected to lose $961,000 in revenue in its first year and $244,000 in the following year. As such, Howells’ payment for access to the site could soften this financial blow.
“At this stage, all Newport City Council have done is confirm the site is to close,” Howells told Decrypt. “They have not indicated they wish to sell the site. So we’ll see how that plays out. If they want to sell it, I’d be willing to discuss options with them ASAP.”
Howells’ hard drive was mistakenly chucked out by his then-girlfriend during an office cleanup in 2013. Over the years, the computer engineer has fought for the right to search the dump which he believes to contain the hard drive. That has even included battles in court.
Just last month, Howells looked to gain access to the landfill site or sue the council for £495 million ($612 million) as compensation. But Judge Keyser KC dismissed the case saying there were no “reasonable grounds” for the claim, and there was “no realistic prospect” of succeeding at trial. The council argued that the environmental impact of a dig was untenable.
“There is the possibility that the platter is damaged beyond repair,” Howells admits, “but there is just as much chance that the HDD is located underneath a piece of wood or metal with additional material buried on top acting as a protection barrier.”
The hard drive contains a wallet.dat file which contains the 51 character private key to the elusive wallet. As such, only a small amount of data is needed to store this key information, which Howells believes increases his odds.
“Both myself and my data recovery partners believe there is a high chance of success due to the tiny amount of data we need to recover, just 51 characters of data,” he finished, “which is a tiny amount compared to a multi-GB hard drive—a pin-prick of data so to speak.”
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
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