01/12/2025
Business Insider
A man trying to recover a hard drive containing $750 million of bitcoin from a landfill just had his latest bid rejected
Nora Redmond
Sat, January 11, 2025 at 4:11 AM PST
James Howells has been fighting for a decade to try to recover a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins.Darren Britton / Wales News
James Howells discarded a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins in 2013.
He has been fighting for access to a local landfill to search for it for a decade.
This week, a judge struck down his latest attempt to search for the bitcoin, worth over $750 million.
A British man's yearslong attempts to find a hard drive containing around $750 million of bitcoin in a landfill site have been hit with a fresh setback.
James Howells, 39, launched a legal bid to force Newport City Council in southern Wales to let him search the local dump where he believes the fortune is located. This week, a judge rejected that bid.
"I consider that the particulars of the claim do not show any reasonable grounds for bringing this case," Judge Keyser KC said Thursday.
Howells says that in 2013, he accidentally discarded a laptop hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins in a garbage bag, which ended up at the landfill site. He says he mistook the hard drive for another identical drive he owned, which was blank.
As of Saturday morning, bitcoin's value is roughly $94,600, putting the value of the cryptocurrency on the hard drive at around $757 million.
For the past decade, Howells has been trying to gain access to the dump to relocate the hard drive. He has repeatedly asked Newport City Council if he can enter and offered to give it a share of the cryptocurrency if it was found.
James Howells has been trying to gain access to a landfill site for the past decade, where he believes his hard drive containing a bitcoin fortune is.