The Man Who Threw Away $900 Million and Spent 12 Years Trying to Dig It Back Up

For more than a decade, a missing hard drive has turned a landfill in Newport, Wales into one of Bitcoin’s most stubborn cliffhangers. Welsh IT engineer James Howells mined 8,000 Bitcoin in the early days and locked the keys on an encrypted drive that his then-girlfriend tossed during a 2013 cleanup, sending it to the Docksway landfill. The wallet’s balance is still there for anyone to verify on the blockchain, but the courts in Cardiff and London shut down his bid to force Newport City Council’s hand in 2025. With the site set to close in the 2025/26 financial year and permitted for a solar farm, Howells has stopped trying to excavate and is now pitching Ceiniog, a Bitcoin layer 2 he says is “backed” by coins he cannot access.

Every so often, a tech story sticks because it’s painfully human: a password lost, a backup missed, a cleanup that moved too fast. For more than a decade, one forgotten piece of storage has served as a reminder that crypto wealth is only as real as the keys behind it. And sometimes, those keys end up under a mountain of trash.

A $923 million mistake

James Howells, a computer engineer from Newport, Wales, mined 8,000 Bitcoin early in the currency’s life and stored the private keys on an encrypted hard drive. In 2013, during a cleanup, his then-girlfriend mistakenly tossed the wrong drive, and it was taken to the Docksway landfill, according to the 2013 disposal summary of the case.

The coins themselves never “vanished” from the blockchain. Howells has said the wallet remains publicly viewable, a cruel detail in a system built for transparency, because it also makes the loss easy to quantify and hard to ignore.

Courts closed the door

After years of trying to negotiate access, Howells turned to litigation in December 2024. The effort hit a wall on January 9, 2025, when Judge Keyser KC of the High Court in Cardiff dismissed his claim as having “no realistic prospect of succeeding,” and confirmed the landfill and its contents are owned by the city council under UK law, per the January 2025 judgment account.

Howells appealed, but in March 2025 the Court of Appeal in London refused permission for the case to proceed. The legal route, like the technical one, offered no reset button.

The last bid to dig, and the landfill’s next life

In July 2025, he tried a different tactic: a formal bid to buy the specific “Area 2” section he believed held the drive, along with taking on long-term environmental liabilities tied to the site. The council’s response focused on prior legal fees before any further discussion, and on August 7, 2025, he said, “I am no longer pursuing the purchase of the landfill.”

The timing mattered. Newport City Council expects the site to close in the 2025/26 financial year, and it has planning permission for a solar farm intended to power new electric garbage trucks, per the solar farm plan.

From buried keys to a new chain pitch

When he walked away, Howells also pivoted to a new crypto project: Ceiniog, a proposed Bitcoin layer-2 network that he says is “backed” by the coins he cannot access. At the time he outlined the idea, the lost stash was valued at $923 million, and the plan included an initial coin offering that had been slated for late 2025, according to the Ceiniog announcement.

It’s a strange form of collateral: digital wealth that can be counted, pointed to, and built around, but never spent.