James Howells tried to sue Newport council to gain access to the tip where his hard drive ended up [BBC]
It has been more than a decade since James Howells’ hard drive – containing Bitcoin now worth hundreds of millions of pounds – ended up on a landfill site.
But despite facing numerous setbacks, he is determined to continue on his mission to retrieve it.
“This is my job, if you will. My 9 to 5,” he said, adding he would “absolutely not” give up.
The value of the cryptocurrency has dramatically increased in recent months, and with the hard drive currently worth about £620m, Mr Howells said “it makes sense for me to focus my energy on this” – although he does do some other work with crypto currencies.
Mr Howells, from Newport, claimed his ex-partner mistakenly threw out the hard drive, containing 8,000 bitcoins, in 2013, with it ending up in a tip owned by Newport City Council.
Last month, a High Court judge threw out his efforts to access the landfill or get £495m in compensation, saying there were no “reasonable grounds” for bringing the claim and “no realistic prospect” of succeeding at a full trial.
He is now planning a case – representing himself using artificial intelligence to support his claim – at the Court of Appeal. He has also expressed interested in buying the site after the council said it planned to close it in the 2025-26 financial year.
Newport council said it was making no further comment on the matter.
Mr Howells was an early adopter of cryptocurrencies, mining the Bitcoin in 2009 when it was a small fraction of its current value.
He has said that his former partner accidentally dumped the hard drive – about the size of a mobile phone – containing a Bitcoin wallet in 2013. As its value soared, he organised a team of experts to attempt to locate and recover it.
He repeatedly asked permission from the council for access to the site, offering it a share of the missing Bitcoin if it was successfully recovered.
After Mr Howells launched legal proceedings, the council applied for a High Court hearing to ask a judge to dismiss the claim before going to trial – which the judge did last month.
The council argued its environmental permits would forbid any attempt to excavate the site for the search and previously said such work “would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area”.
Unwilling to give up, Mr Howells now believes he has two options open to him to retrieve the digital wallet – launch a case at the Court of Appeal, or work with investors to try to buy the landfill site from the council, after it announced the site is “coming to the end of its life” and it plans to close it within the next two years.
Mr Howells says he was one of the first people in the UK to adopt Bitcoin [BBC]
Mr Howells told BBC News he was pleased with the work his legal team had done in the High Court trial, but that he would now be representing himself in a case filed with the Court of Appeal – using an “artificial intelligence agent” to assist his claim.
He described AI as “an absolutely amazing technology” that had helped him better understand court processes and the law, and that he believed he had about seven “solid grounds in law” for his case, which he hopes to be able to present in-person to the Court of Appeal.
One of the arguments in his case will centre on the council’s plans to close the site, something he argued should have been revealed during the High Court trial.
“That is material information that should have been made [at the trial] – the judge should have been aware of that, as well as myself,” he said.
Mr Howells also said buying and fully excavating the site would save the council what he argued were significant maintenance costs once the site closes.
“Every single piece would be extracted or recycled, and at the end of the process we would have a hard drive in our hands – and we would also have an empty landfill,” he said.
In the High Court trial, the council also argued that the hard drive became its property as soon as it entered the landfill site, but Mr Howells said this failed to take into account the fact it was his ex-partner who threw it out.
“It was taken without my permission or consent,” he said.
Newport council has announced plans to close the tip site [Getty Images]
Mr Howells said he was also exploring the option of buying the site from the council, adding he had “preliminary agreements” with investors – including those in the Middle East and the United States – who could make funding available if he had permission to buy the site.
“They’re not just going to put millions of quid in my back pocket… but if the council show a willingness to sell the site, then the funding will be available,” he said.
The council has made no indication it is interested in selling the site and, as part of its closure, has secured planning permission for a solar farm on part of the land.
Having spent many years pursuing it, including opening legal cases, Mr Howells said he was certain the hard drive remained on the landfill, which holds more than 1.4 million tonnes of waste.
He said he had done his “due diligence and research”, having spoken to a site manager at the landfill.
“Anything that was put into that site is still there. So, where else could it be?”
Asked if he would ever give up his mission to retrieve it, he said: “Absolutely not. This is like the final battle in Braveheart.”
Early adopters of Bitcoin were known as Cypherpunks [Getty Images]
Bitcoins can be split into smaller units, with a satoshi being the smallest monetary unit.
Satoshis are named after Bitcoin’s inventor Satoshi Nakamoto – believed to be a pseudonym – who wrote a key document about the currency in 2008.
Those investing in the product around this time, like Mr Howells, were part of a “very small” crypto community known as Cypherpunks, said Billy Bambrough, author of the CryptoCodex newsletter.
Bitcoin was not the first cryptocurrency to be invented, but it did gain considerable attention with early adherents being “very quickly enamoured with it”, Mr Bambrough said.
Prices began to rise in about 2016 and 2017, and again in 2020 during the Covid pandemic when “stock markets, cryptocurrencies and meme coins went up hugely”.
“A lot of people got very rich, but a lot of people also lost money,” Mr Bambrough said.
The cryptocurrency also saw rapid increases in late 2024, shortly after Donald Trump’s victory in the US general election, with his administration being seen as far friendlier towards cryptocurrencies than the Biden White House.
“A lot of people in the crypto and Bitcoin worlds say the price has gone up so much in such a short amount of time, they claim it could go higher and higher,” Mr Bambrough said.
“So I can understand why James [Howells] is keen to find his Bitcoin.”
