Software engineer James Howells has officially given up on trying to recover a hard drive containing private keys to 8,000 BTC, which he accidentally threw away in 2013. At peak value, the lost coins could have been worth close to $900 million. Howells spent more than a decade searching for the device, but ultimately failed to retrieve it.
One of the First Bitcoin Miners
In late 2008, Howells became interested in the newly published Bitcoin whitepaper and began mining cryptocurrency on his Dell XPS gaming laptop. According to him, during the early days, he was mining between 400 and 800 BTC per day, storing the private keys on a 32-kilobyte storage device. He eventually accumulated about 8,000 BTC, becoming one of the five earliest known miners on the Bitcoin network in 2009.
In 2013, Howells mistakenly threw away the crucial hard drive along with another, less important device. At the time, the value of his holdings was around $600,000. Both Howells and his former girlfriend have blamed each other for the incident, but the details were never clarified. The hard drive ended up in a municipal landfill in Newport, Wales, buried beneath 25,000 cubic meters of waste weighing 1.5 million tons.
Attempts to Recover the Lost BTC
Starting in 2017, as the price of Bitcoin began to soar, Howells made multiple attempts to launch a recovery operation. He offered local authorities up to 25% of the recovered amount in exchange for permission to search, but Newport’s city council consistently refused, citing environmental risks and the likelihood that the device was irreparably damaged.
On January 10, 2025, a court officially rejected Howells’ lawsuit, stripping him of the right to organize any excavation efforts. The judge cited the lack of realistic chances for success, despite the engineer’s ambitious recovery plan, which included partnerships with hedge funds, $11 million in funding, AI-powered machines, trained Boston Dynamics robots, and digital modeling of the landfill site. Even assurances from NASA engineers that the data could potentially be recovered did not alter the court’s decision.
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