Newport man James Howells to launch new cryptocurrency based on his inaccessible Bitcoin财富

James Howells, from Newport, is set to start a new cryptocurrency based on his inaccessible Bitcoin wealth. The 39-year-old dad-of-three, who learned about Bitcoin in 2009 by spending time on internet forums, believes he was one of the first miners of the cryptocurrency.

A man whose bid to dig up a hard drive containing around £600m worth of Bitcoin from a landfill site has failed in the High Court has said he now plans to create a new cryptocurrency based on his inaccessible Bitcoin wealth. James Howells, from Newport, claims to have mined 8,000 Bitcoins in 2009 which were stored on a hard drive in his home office. But in 2013 his then-partner is said to have mistakenly thrown out the hard drive which ended up at the Docksway landfill site in Newport.

Mr Howells, 39, has spent years trying to get permission to excavate the site and approached investors who were prepared to pay for the dig. But Newport council refused and Mr Howells took them to the High Court in a "last resort" attempt to get the go-ahead for the dig or be paid £495m in damages.

His claim was thrown out by Judge Keyser KC on Thursday, who said it would have "no realistic prospect" of success at trial. Mr Howells told WalesOnline he now feels "the dig is completely off the table".

But he said a comment made by the judge during the hearing could help him in a new scheme to finally make the most of his inaccessible Bitcoin. He said: "During the hearing, the judge himself stated it was his belief that the council owned the physical hard drive but that I am the owner of the Bitcoin. But he was disappointed that this finding did not feature in the written judgement handed down by Judge Keyser on Thursday.

"What was issued was the judgment but there is also going to be a final order," Mr Howells added. "I am hoping the order will recognise my ownership of the Bitcoin in law which will allow me to legally tokenise them into a new asset."

Mr Howells admitted his tokenisation plan has been a difficult concept for some people to understand but he made this analogy to explain it. He said: "In the old days, gold bars would be held in a vault and the notes traded in public would represent the value held in the vault. I could use the Bitcoin as backing, like a financial vault, and create a new currency - let's imagine it's called James Coin - which would replicate one for one the assets in the Bitcoin wallet.

"Everyone can see the Bitcoin is never going to move. I can't get the private key so it's going to be sat there for eternity. But I believe with a court declaration of ownership, I can tokenise them into a sub-currency. I would become a figurehead for James Coin and it would be marketed as a child currency of Bitcoin. Its value would always be derived from Bitcoin - James Coin's value will go up and down as the market price of Bitcoin goes up and down."

We asked Mr Howells if his inability to access the Bitcoin would be an obstacle to these ambitions. "It's not an obstacle," he replied. "It's a benefit. The landfill acts like a super-duper storage vault. The coins never come out of the vault, and something else that's traded represents what is in the vault."

Mr Howells believes he could get the cryptocurrency running within a year. Even in a best-case scenario the scheme would not see him recover all of his £600m wealth, he acknowledged. "It's a very small win for me but it would allow me to do something else, rather than sit there and look at the Bitcoin I can't access."

He added that James Coin was only a "placeholder" for the currency's yet-to-be-decided name. When we asked if he had considered using 'Bin Coin' for marketing purposes, he said he saw the funny side but he was more likely to go with Ceiniog Coin. "Ceiniog is the Welsh word for penny, or the smallest denomination of money," he said, adding that he liked the "old-school" association with ancient Welsh money.

After securing backing from investors, Mr Howells had assembled a team of experts who were prepared to carry out a £10million landfill dig at no cost to the council. He had also offered the council 10% of the Bitcoin's value if recovered. But James Goudie KC, representing the council in court, argued that this could have amounted to a "bribe" and would have been playing "fast and loose" with regulations. He said that the hard drive had become council property when it entered the landfill and that the site's environmental permits would prevent the proposed excavation.

Mr Howells' team had narrowed down the likely location of the hard drive and estimated the dig would take 18 to 36 months followed by around a year of remediation work. His barrister Dean Armstrong KC said the search was not so much a "needle in a haystack" case as a "finely tuned plan