James Howells, an IT engineer from Newport in South Wales, says he accidentally threw away a hard drive containing the private keys to 7,500 bitcoins while clearing out his desk in the summer of 2013. Based on the valuation cited in the source material, the holdings were worth nearly $300 million at the time of reporting. He believes the device ended up in the city’s landfill and has spent years trying to gain permission to search for it.
A high-stakes search proposal
According to the report, Howells says the mistake happened because he had two nearly identical hard drives and discarded the wrong one. After realizing what had happened, he approached Newport City Council for permission to excavate part of the landfill site. Those requests, however, have been repeatedly denied.
In an effort to move the plan forward, Howells has offered the city 25% of the value of the bitcoins allegedly stored on the drive, which the report estimates at roughly $72 million. He said the money could be structured as a Covid relief fund for local residents. He also stated that a hedge fund was prepared to back the project financially and that funds could be placed in escrow, aiming to address concerns over who would bear the cost of the operation.
Howells says the search could be targeted
Rather than proposing a broad excavation of the entire landfill, Howells claims he could narrow the search to a specific section. He said that if he were granted access to landfill records, he could identify the week he discarded the drive, trace the serial number of the bin involved, and then pinpoint the relevant grid location within the site.
He also outlined a more controlled operational approach. According to the source, the plan would involve using an inflatable structure to create an airtight seal around the designated search area in order to prevent landfill gases from escaping. The proposal appears intended to show that the recovery effort could be carried out in a limited and managed way rather than as a full-scale, open excavation.
Still hopeful despite years underground
One of the biggest questions surrounding the case is whether the hard drive, if found, would still be readable after spending years buried in landfill conditions. Howells acknowledged there is no guarantee the device still works, but said he remains cautiously optimistic. In his view, even if the outer casing has corroded, the internal disk where the data is stored may still have a reasonable chance of remaining intact.
At the same time, he conceded that the longer the matter drags on, the lower the odds of a successful data recovery. That tension has always sat at the center of the story: the asset value is extraordinary, but the technical and environmental uncertainties are equally significant.
City council says no
Newport City Council has maintained its refusal. A council spokeswoman confirmed that officials have been contacted multiple times since 2014 about retrieving a piece of IT hardware said to contain bitcoins. The council’s position, as described in the report, is that the economics and logistics simply do not justify the attempt.
Officials said the cost of digging up the landfill, storing the excavated material, and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds. Even that spending would come with no assurance that the hard drive could be found, or that it would still be in working condition if located. In other words, a very expensive operation could still end in total failure.
The council also pointed to legal and environmental constraints. It said excavation is not possible under the site’s licensing permit and that any such work would have a major environmental impact on the surrounding area. Beyond that, the council raised a practical liability question: if the excavation were approved and the drive was either not found or too damaged to recover the data, who would ultimately absorb the costs?
For those reasons, the council said it had been clear with Howells that it could not assist with the proposal.
A familiar crypto lesson: ownership depends on keys
The story has become one of the most striking real-world examples of a core principle in cryptocurrency: digital assets on a blockchain can remain untouched and verifiable, yet still be effectively lost forever if the holder no longer controls the private keys. Unlike traditional financial systems, there is generally no central administrator who can reverse the loss, issue a replacement, or restore access.
That is what makes the Howells case so compelling. The reported fortune may still exist on-chain, but the ability to spend or move it depends entirely on whether the private keys can be recovered from one misplaced hard drive. The case also highlights the long-term consequences of early-era bitcoin storage practices, when many holders used simple local storage methods without the layered backup procedures now widely recommended across the industry.
An unresolved standoff
As presented in the source material, the dispute remains unresolved. Howells believes the search can be performed in a focused area, financed with outside backing, and potentially deliver a substantial financial benefit to the city. The council, by contrast, sees a proposal burdened by regulatory barriers, environmental risks, large upfront costs, and no certainty of success.
For now, the hard drive remains, at least in Howells’ account, somewhere beneath years of landfill waste. And unless the city changes its position, the missing bitcoins will remain one of crypto’s most famous lost fortunes—valuable in theory, inaccessible in practice.