An early Bitcoin miner says he lost a fortune worth more than $700 million after his partner accidentally threw a hard drive containing 8,000 coins in a landfill dumpster more than a decade ago.
James Howells of Newport, Wales, has asked his local council if he can dig through its rubbish site to find the discarded hard drive—but he has been denied so far.
Howells is now taking Newport City Council to court, saying it either needs to give him access to his property or settle the damages for the value of the drive.
Howells, 39, says he mined the coins himself in 2009—drawn to the world of cryptocurrencies in the wake of the financial crisis a year prior.
The Bitcoin were stored on a private key within Howells’s computer hard drive, which was placed in a drawer while Howells—a systems engineer by trade—updated his PC.
In 2013, Howells said he placed that hard drive in a plastic bag, which his former partner then erroneously took straight to the dump, depositing it in a large waste bin.
With the price of Bitcoin sitting at an all-time high of $93,637 at the time of writing, the buried drive would potentially be worth more than $749 million.
“This problem is never going to go away. This is always going to be a treasure hunt,” Howells tells Fortune in a phone interview. “The treasure is getting more and more valuable by the day, and that isn’t going to stop.”
Howells is so desperate to retrieve the hard drive he says he offered Newport City Council 25% of its value to spend on community projects in return for its cooperation.
However, he claimed, the council has turned down Howells’s request to dig through its dump some 10 times.
Willing to sue
As a result, the embattled crypto-fan reduced his offer to 10% of the drive’s value, and now says he’s willing to sue for half a billion British pounds if he’s not granted access for a search.
Howells added that on Dec. 3 his legal team will present their case to a commerce court in Cardiff, the capital of Wales.
They will argue that Howells has not only intellectual property rights over the drive—because he mined the coins—but also general property rights because he did not willingly hand the object over to the council-owned landfill.
A spokesman for Newport City Council told Fortune: “Newport City Council has been contacted multiple times since 2013 about the possibility of retrieving a piece of IT hardware said to be in our landfill site.
“The council has told Mr. Howells multiple times that excavation is not possible under our environmental permit, and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area.
“The council is the only body authorized to carry out operations on the site.”
On the legal proceedings, the spokesman added: “Mr. Howells’s claim has no merit, and the council is vigorously resisting it.”
Howells claims he would only need to excavate a small parcel of land because he knows precisely when the hard drive—around the size of an iPhone—was thrown away.
Howells added he doesn’t even want the drive back because it would potentially make him a centi-millionaire, he said he simply wants justice after a more than decade-long battle and the ability to potentially invest the fortune in businesses close to him.
He added: “Our primary reason for going to court is to seek access to the landfill. However if…that option is unavailable then, yes, I will be making a claim for the full amount against the council which I genuinely don’t want to do.
“I would prefer to do the dig and do the search. The reason for that is it makes sense financially…if I were to recover [the coins] they would actually fetch up to 20% more value than the current book price of Bitcoin. The reason for that is these are 2009 coins, so they’d be seen as collectors’ items.”
He added that the coins had also never been traded, which would further add to their value.
“The first…mistake was obviously myself putting the hard drive into the black bag by mistake,” Howells said.
“Then my partner taking the hard drive to the landfill, and then Newport City Council not engaging with with me when I first them asked them in 2013—I think that is the biggest mistake of all.
“It would have been a lot easier to recover that hard drive back in 2013 when there was only sort of three to four months’ worth of material on top—it would have been so much easier. And secondly, if Newport City Council had engaged with me they would have learned everything they could about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency and blockchain technology—and they would be…rich right now.”
