The $500 Million Hard Drive Buried in a Welsh Landfill

The Mistake

In the summer of 2013, James Howells was cleaning out his home office in Newport, Wales. The IT worker had been mining Bitcoin since 2009, back when the process required little more than a standard laptop and some patience. Over those early years, he had accumulated 8,000 BTC on a small hard drive — a fortune that, at the time, was worth relatively little.

Howells had already removed the hard drive from his laptop and placed it in a drawer. During the cleanup, two nearly identical drives sat in a bag. One was blank. One held the private keys to his Bitcoin wallet. His partner, unaware of the distinction, discarded the bag. The drive ended up in the Docksway landfill, buried beneath years of municipal waste on the outskirts of Newport.

By the time Howells realised what had happened, the drive was already entombed under thousands of tonnes of refuse. Bitcoin’s price was beginning to climb, and so was his desperation.

The Aftermath

What followed was not a story of quiet acceptance. Howells dedicated the next decade of his life to a single goal: dig up that landfill. He assembled teams of engineers, data-recovery specialists, and environmental consultants. He drafted detailed excavation proposals. He secured private funding estimated at tens of millions of pounds. He offered Newport City Council a significant share of any recovered Bitcoin.

The council refused. Repeatedly. Their objections centred on environmental concerns — the risk of disturbing toxic waste, the disruption to surrounding communities, and the regulatory burden of permitting such an operation. Howells countered with increasingly sophisticated proposals, including robotic sorting systems and AI-powered identification tools.

None of it mattered. The council would not budge.

As Bitcoin’s price surged past $60,000 per coin, the theoretical value of Howells’s lost drive climbed above $500 million. The story attracted worldwide media attention, turning a local waste-management dispute into a parable about digital wealth and human error.

Current Status

In January 2025, the High Court of England and Wales dismissed Howells’s legal claim against Newport City Council. The judge ruled that the council was within its rights to deny access to the landfill and that the environmental and logistical concerns were legitimate grounds for refusal.

Howells was defiant in the wake of the decision.

“I’m done asking permission.”

The statement hinted at further action, though what form that might take remained unclear. The drive continues to sit somewhere beneath the Docksway landfill, degrading with each passing year.

Environmental experts have noted that even if the drive were recovered, there is no guarantee the data would be readable. Hard drives are mechanical devices with delicate internal components. Exposure to moisture, pressure, and corrosive landfill gases could have destroyed the platters long ago.

Lessons

The Howells case illustrates a fundamental tension at the heart of Bitcoin’s design. The same feature that makes Bitcoin resistant to censorship and seizure — the requirement that only the holder of a private key can access funds — also means that losing that key is functionally equivalent to destroying the coins themselves.

There is no customer-support line for Bitcoin. There is no password-reset option. The network does not care whether you are a careless IT worker or a sophisticated institutional investor. If the key is gone, the coins are gone.

For those who hold cryptocurrency, the Howells story is a reminder that physical security matters as much as digital security. A backup stored in a single location is not a backup at all. And the people you live with need to understand what they should never throw away.

Eight thousand Bitcoin remain locked in a wallet that no one can access, buried beneath a Welsh landfill that no one will excavate. The coins have not moved since 2013. They likely never will.

Related Reading

• How to Pass Bitcoin to Your Family — Recovery packs and backup plans that prevent this kind of loss.
• Seed Phrase Inheritance — Why backups stored in a single location are not backups at all.
• Stefan Thomas: 7,002 BTC Locked Behind a Password — Another single-point-of-failure that locked away a fortune.
• Clifton Collins: 6,000 BTC in a Fishing Rod — A different physical storage failure with the same result.
• Lost Bitcoin Statistics — How cases like this add up to billions in lost Bitcoin.