The Man Who Threw Away $800 Million Worth of Bitcoin Is Making a Last-Ditch Effort to Recover His Lost Fortune

James Howells, a computer science analyst from Newport, Wales, has spent over a decade battling local authorities for permission to search the massive waste site

A British man who accidentally threw away a hard drive containing Bitcoin now worth around $800 million is making a last-ditch effort to recover his lost fortune — offering to buy the landfill where it was dumped before the site is permanently shut down.

James Howells, a computer science analyst from Newport, Wales, has spent over a decade battling local authorities for permission to search the massive waste site where he believes his missing hard drive is buried. With the Newport City Council preparing to close the landfill, Howells is making a final plea.

Howells' ordeal began in 2013 when he mistakenly discarded the hard drive while cleaning out his office. A miscommunication with his then-partner led to the device — containing the only copy of his 51-character private key necessary to access his Bitcoin wallet — being unknowingly thrown away.

Back in the late 2000s, when cryptocurrency was still in its infancy, Howells mined Bitcoin as a hobby. He only realized his devastating mistake months later, by which time Bitcoin's value had surged.

Since then, he has repeatedly attempted to recover the device, even offering to fund an excavation and share 25% of the Bitcoin's value with the Newport City Council. However, local authorities have consistently denied his requests. A judge previously ruled that Howells had “no reasonable grounds” for legal action and stated there was “no realistic prospect” of success if the case proceeded to trial.

Now, as the landfill's closure approaches, Howells is hoping that purchasing the site will finally allow him to search for his long-lost Bitcoin fortune.

“This needle is very, very, very valuable — $800 million,” he said, according to SWNS. “Which means I’m willing to search every piece of hay in order to find the needle.”

But the Newport City Council has warned that the chances of locating the 12-year-old hard drive remain slim.

“The site is due to be closed imminently and, once closed, there will be no realistic prospect of retrieving the drive,” a spokesperson for the council told SWNS.

“The site is also set to be capped and landscaped, making any future attempt to locate the drive even less likely to succeed.”

Undeterred, Howells is refusing to give up, believing that buried beneath the landfill's mountains of waste could be one of the most valuable lost fortunes in history.