Man who lost $800 million bitcoin in landfill wants to buy the garbage dump

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Buried deep in a Welsh landfill, beneath years of accumulated trash, is a hard drive that contains almost $800 million in bitcoin, or so James Howells claims, after he mistakenly threw the drive away in 2013.

And now, after years of fighting the local government in court to get the hard drive back, Howells has come up with a new plan: to simply purchase the landfill.

On Thursday, he repeated comments he made earlier, which were widely reported in the US media on Monday, although he didn't specify who was providing the funding.

In 2021, permission was obtained to dig up the site.

His latest plan comes after a British High Court judge blocked his case from going to trial, issuing a ruling in January that dismissed his efforts to compel the council to allow him to search the landfill.

Howells carelessly threw away the crucial hard drive in August 2013 when he was cleaning out his house, believing it to be an empty drive that held no information. He placed it in a trash bag in the hallway for his then-partner to take out to the dump, only realizing later, as the value of bitcoin increased, that he had mistakenly thrown away the wrong one.

Since then, the value of the bitcoin Howell's money has skyrocketed from around $9 million to almost $800 million, as prices of cryptocurrency have skyrocketed in recent years.

Each Bitcoin transaction demands a private key, a confidential piece of information stored within every individual Bitcoin wallet that mathematically verifies the transaction originated from that wallet.

Howell's hard drive is said to have "a record" of that private key, according to a ruling by Judge Andrew Keyser issued in January.

"The situation is no different in principle than what it would be if the private key had been written on a piece of paper that was thrown away in a landfill," Keyser said.

Without knowing the private key, Howells can't access the bitcoin he mined all those years ago when bitcoin was still a relatively unknown cryptocurrency in the tech world.

"The council has informed Mr. Howells multiple times that excavation is not allowed under our permit, and doing so would have a significant negative impact on the environment in the surrounding area," a spokesperson stated previously.

“The cost of excavating the landfill, storing and processing the waste could easily exceed millions of dollars – with no promise of even locating it or that it will still be functional.”

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