This past October, I wrote about a man named James Howells. Howells is a UK resident who sued his local counsel while trying to recover a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoin—valued at around $647 million at that time.
Those coins only increased in value. As of the time of publication, those 8,000 coins would be worth $760 million. The Council didn’t let him search through a decade’s worth of garbage to find his hard drive. So now Howells is thinking about buying the landfill.
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Back in 2013, Howells’ then-partner mistakenly tossed out the hard drive in question along with a bunch of other trash. He’s been trying to figure out a way into that landfill to find that hard drive ever since, having spent over a decade trying to come up with some legal plan to search for his missing fortune. His latest idea is to just straight up buy the garbage dump.
Guy Who Accidentally Threw Away $700 Million in Bitcoin Wants to Buy Landfill to Find It
Trying to find a single hard drive in a landfill sounds like an impossibility, but Howells says he has a pretty good idea where it’s buried. Citing safety concerns, city officials rejected his pleas to excavate.
The inexorable flow of time is on Howells’ side. The landfill in question is nearing capacity and there are plans to close it, cap it, and convert at least a portion of the land into a solar farm. If that were to happen, Howells’ dream would officially be dead as there would be no way to excavate that ground.
But Howells has proposed an alternative: that he and his investment partners purchase the land “as is” so they can do whatever they want with it, which in this case would be trying to find a hard drive buried beneath over 10 years’ worth of compacted garbage.
Local officials have not yet commented on Howells’ idea to buy the dump, but considering that previous counsel rulings suggested that the hard drive had become the Council’s property when it entered the landfill, and considering that a High Court judge this past January accepted the council’s argument that Howells was not entitled to retrieve the missing hard drive, you could probably assume that they are treating all of this with a big eye roll.
