If you believed that you knew where a hard drive containing more than $700 million in Bitcoin was located, how far would you go to get your hands on it? James Howells, a British IT worker who mined himself a sizable fortune of the cryptocurrency before accidentally throwing away the hard drive he stored the key on, is mulling buying the entire stretch of land where he suspects the drive to be buried just so he can try to dig it up, according to a report from The Guardian. If the name James Howells has a faint feeling of familiarity, it’s because he’s been at this for years now. Howells first made headlines in 2013 when he revealed to the public that he lost his ability to access the 7,500 Bitcoins he mined back in 2009 when they were basically worthless. At that point, his Bitcoin stash was worth about $7 million. It’s obviously kept climbing ever since, with the upward trajectory making Howells more and more desperate to get the hard drive back. He has a pretty good idea as to where the hard drive is—well, as good of an idea as you can have about where an extremely small item in a landfill could be. He believes it is somewhere in a landfill operated by the city of Newport, South Wales. Based on when it was tossed, he has surmised that it should be in a particular section of the landfill that houses more than 15,000 metric tons of waste. City officials told Howells that if his hard drive is in there, it’s “buried under 25,000 cubic meters of waste and earth.” Now with the site approaching capacity, Howells wants to buy it off the city so he can go searching for his lost drive.
Ever since Howells first came forward with his problem, he has cropped up occasionally with a new harebrained scheme to get the hard drive back. In 2017, he pleaded with the city of Newport to let him dig for it. The city said no, citing safety concerns and the risk of encouraging treasure hunters to go on the world’s largest dumpster diving expedition. In 2021, Howells offered the city 25% of the proceeds if he found the hard drive in exchange for letting him dig up the dump, to which the city once again said no. In 2022, Howells said if he can’t go into the dump, he’ll send Boston Dynamics robotic dogs to do the digging for him. That was part of a larger, $11 million business plan in which he proposed spending three years excavating the landfill to find his hard drive, while also turning the site into a mining facility. Newport did not go for that, either.
Since the city has made it pretty clear it is simply uninterested in being in the James Howells business, he’s since taken a more adversarial approach, threatening to and ultimately suing Newport’s city council for the right to try to find the drive. That fell short earlier this year when a judge ruled his case had “no realistic prospect of succeeding” if it moved forward. So now his intention is to just straight up buy the landfill from the city, following an announced plan to clo