James Howells Explores Buying the Newport Landfill to Recover His Lost Bitcoin
After losing a High Court effort to excavate a Welsh landfill, James Howells said he was exploring buying the entire site with investors to recover a hard drive discarded in 2013 and believed to contain roughly 7,500–8,000 BTC.
The long-running story of James Howells took another extraordinary turn in February 2025. Howells, a Welsh computer engineer, had spent more than a decade trying to gain access to a Newport landfill where a hard drive containing the private keys to thousands of bitcoin was believed to have been buried after being mistakenly discarded in 2013.
A High Court ruling in January rejected his attempt to compel Newport City Council to permit an excavation. With the legal route closed and the council planning to close and cap the landfill, Howells told reporters in February that he and investment partners were exploring whether they could buy the site itself. At contemporary Bitcoin prices, the coins associated with the discarded drive were worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
The exact number of bitcoin has varied in reporting over the years, commonly appearing as roughly 7,500 or 8,000 BTC. That uncertainty does not diminish the historical point. The saga became one of Bitcoin’s clearest demonstrations of what irreversible self-custody can mean in human terms: ownership can be economically enormous while access depends on a tiny piece of physical key material that no bank, government, or network administrator can recreate.
The February proposal to purchase the landfill was not merely another retelling of the 2013 mistake. It was a new stage in a twelve-year struggle to recover inaccessible bitcoin and an unusual illustration of how Bitcoin’s custody model can create legal, physical, and personal consequences far outside ordinary financial infrastructure.