Last time we met 39-year-old James Howells from Newport, Wales, he was petitioning his local council to let him excavate a garbage dump in pursuit of

'Newport would look like Dubai' if guy could dumpster dive for lost Bitcoin hard drive

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2024-10-16 12:00:03

Last time we met 39-year-old James Howells from Newport, Wales, he was petitioning his local council to let him excavate a garbage dump in pursuit of a lost hard drive he believes holds the key to 7,500 Bitcoin. Now he is suing the authority to force its hand.

In 2021, Newport City Council turned him down, saying: "The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds – without any guarantee of either finding it or it still being in working order."

That 7,500 Bitcoin (Wales Online reports it as 8,000) could have been worth as much as $7.5 million at one point in 2013, when Howells suspects he tossed the drive in "a clearout" of old IT equipment.

Nowadays, in spite of the spectacular fall of cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2022 and a crypto winter around the same time, we're looking at a valuation of about $503 million at current rates.

Not one to let sleeping dogs lie, and with the probability of ever recovering the drive slimming each passing day, Howells has filed a claim against Newport City Council for £495,314,800 ($644 million) in damages, Wales Online reports, the sum being "the peak valuation of his 8,000 Bitcoins from earlier this year."