Well it’s up to $647 million now and he still hasn’t gotten them to dig:
Why couldn’t there be a deal whereby the landfill is excavated at Howell’s expense and he pays for the cost of sealing off the landfill in a safe manner, and for labor costs, out of pocket? Of course, it’s a chicken-and-egg problem since he would first need to recover the $765 million to pay for the deal.
Did you read the article? Basically, he threw it away, if anyone, it belongs to the Dump owner. Of course, he claims others threw it away without permission, which, again, means he should be suing that person but isn’t (said person of course denies this). Second, he missed the window (statue of limitations) by years. Third, as you mention, finding it and assuming it would be in any condition to recover after over 11 years is extremely speculative, and I can’t imagine the damage of searching the entire dump (or even just the area he thinks it might be) with a fine tooth comb, the excavation, and the remediation afterwards.
Even if he had a snowballs chance (and since there was a summary judgement against him, there almost certainly wasn’t) I’d have asked for a bond for say 125% of the expected costs for remediation before I allowed him and his partners to start digging - because once they can’t find it, or if they do, and he can’t recover it because it’s been stewing in a landfill along with 35000 TONS of other garbage for 11+ years, he or his backers are going to be extremely reluctant to spend millions more fixing the dump.
In such stories, it is wholly unsurprising to find a long-suffering woman in the background.
Ex-girlfriend Halfina Eddy-Evans:
I’d love nothing more than him to find it. I’m sick and tired of hearing about it
This guy is just plain nuts. He wants to make his hard drive in situ in the landfill be some sort of vault for bankable value, like those big Yapese stone coins. And he “halfway jokes” about getting Trump to help him.
And James said one omission from the judge had been ‘extra painful’ as he refused to acknowledge him as the owner of the coins – taking away the option to ‘tokenize’ them in the future.
He added: “The coins have never moved. It would become like a vault where the gold is stored and I would create a new asset in order to trade in public.
“The value of the new crypto would be linked to the wallet address forever. I was hoping to salvage something from this. Using tokenisation to turn to the coins into a new asset.
“Unfortunately the judge refused to grant me ownership of the bitcoins as part of the order.
“Newport District Council own the physical hard drive but they don’t own the Bitcoins. But the judge didn’t say in his ruling ‘James Howells owns the Bitcoin’ which was the stance originally agreed even with the council.
“That would have given me some hope for the future — a small glimmer of hope that although I could not do the dig I could re-focus and work on the tokenisation project. The judge just ripped all that out.
“It was gut-wrenching to be honest.”
“I don’t know what else to do. Maybe Donald Trump could help make something happen. I would certainly cut Trump in on the deal if he could help.
“I am appealing to him and anyone else who can help sort this madness. I’m half joking of course but it would be great if he did.”
A better analogy than you might realize. There’s a very similar story about those:
One time, according to the island’s oral tradition, a work crew was bringing was bringing a giant stone coin back to yap on a boat. And just before they got back to the island, they hit a big storm. The stone wound up on the bottom of the ocean.
The crew made it back to the island and told everybody what happened. And everybody decided that the piece of stone money was still good — even though it was on the bottom of the ocean.
Even though the coin is totally inaccessible, and frankly no one knows if it’s still in one piece, they still treat it as real!
I don’t know the situation in Wales, but landfills are more expensive than most people would guess. They’re also more complicated than most people would guess. And there are fines for putting one out of regulation.
I expect that this guy has no idea at all where to dig. He’s just expecting to toss everything around as if it were nothing but a pile of garbage. It’s not. It’s an engineered landfill.
Very true. There is a civil engineer with a YT channel that I enjoy. Here is a fairly recent video that explains how landfills work. They aren’t just big holes in the ground you fill with trash.
That was really well done. The ending reminds me of the South Coast Botanic Gardens in Palos Verdes, CA.
Early in my environmental engineering career, I worked on a 10-acre baseliner and a 10-acre cap at a landfill for about a year. I inspected every seam of the 60-mil HDPE baseliner (x2 for the double liner), and then for the 40-mil cap. The testing and quality assurance to ensure the liner was virtually leakproof was astounding.
This does raise the question, however:
Given the inevitability of events like this (see also, death of owner with no documentation left behind, etc) and the exponentially declining creation of BTC, given enough time won’t the supply shrink and create massive BTC inflation? Any economists want to speculate on how that impacts the viability of BTC (FTR, I’m in camp “this whole crypto thing ends badly”)
Perhaps inflation at first, but when bitcoins eventually become so scarce that they become a poor choice as a medium of exchange for goods/services, their value will likely plummet. When merchants and banks stop accepting bitcoins as payment (because bitcoins are so scarce as to make those transactions rare and not worth supporting), why will bitcoins be worth anything?
At today’s price, all of the bitcoins in the world have a total market value of about $2 trillion. The max number of bitcoins is 21 million, and the smallest unit of a bitcoin is one satoshi, or 1/1E8 of a bitcoin. Far in the future when one satoshi is the only amount of bitcoin that hasn’t been lost, it’s hard to imagine that satoshi being worth anything near $2T.
8000 bitcoins would have been worth about $3M back when the HD got thrown out. That’s a lot of wealth to stash at your residence. On a related note, a woman had her crypto wallet (containing $900K) burn up in the Palisades fire last week:
https://www.cryptotimes.io/2025/01/09/70-year-old-womans-crypto-lost-in-la-wildfires-disaster/
I wouldn’t keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in my house, unless I could make several copies of it and keep those copies in physically distant (or at least fire/flood resistant) storage locations. Why are these people not keeping copies of their extremely valuable bitcoin wallets in other places?
So, that’s how “real” bitcoin is that its reality depends on its storage on one disposable hard drive? It simply disappears forever with no backup or record of its ownership anywhere else? At least one can hold, stack, etc Monopoly “money”. LOL
No, that’s not at all how it is. What he lost is effectively the password to his Bitcoin wallet. The wallet is stored everywhere (or at least on millions of machines in the Bitcoin network). It can’t be lost. But without the password, he can’t access it anymore. Nobody can.
This is no different from having your bank password and identifying documents stored in a wooden safe that gets burned in a fire. The money is still there, but you can’t access it anymore, since you don’t have the password and you can’t prove that you’re you.
This is an odd idea. Do you think that a stack of paper currency is immune from getting accidentally discarded and lost in a landfill? Or burned in a fire and destroyed forever?
There are many legitimate criticisms of cryptocurrency. This isn’t it.
The blockchain will forever know that your bitcoins exist - it’s just that nobody will ever be able to spend them again. It’s like having a safe full of cash buried 2 miles down in a collapsed and backfilled mineshaft.
Well, it’s certainly possible to throw out real cash money into a landfill as well. It can also burn up in a fire.
(BTW, I’m not defending bitcoin here. I think the whole concept is kind of stupid and fundamentally wasteful as computers and electricity are utilized for something with absolutely no utility.)
So, there is no way to prove ownership? If I forget the password to my account, there is somewhere I can go (bank) and present credentials so that I can reconnect. So, as I understand the OP, he has, essentially, lost 7.5 million dollars of virtually stored money on a hard drive simply with the lack of a password?
Hey, you bitcoin warriors enjoy yourselves and have at, but you’ll have to forgive me for mistrusting it from the very first moment it was introduced.
I would probably store multiple copies of the password in various places, including written or printed on paper. No idea why people don’t seem to do that.
As I understand it, the bitcoins themselves aren’t on the hard drive. The hard drive instead contains the guy’s passkey to access those bitcoins (which are themselves virtual as well). The bitcoins are stored virtually all over the place in the cloud. The passkey is apparently only on that one hard drive.
And at today’s prices the 8,000 lost bitcoins are now worth $821,200,000. That’s why the guy has been fighting so hard to try to recover the lost hard drive and why it keeps making the news.
P.S. The closest analogy I can think of is someone accidentally throwing away a winning lottery ticket [that never expires]. The lottery money is still there, but without the ticket you can’t prove the money is rightfully yours.