Buried in the depths of a landfill in Wales, UK, under trash layers with years old, there is a hard drive that contains the key to almost 800 million euros in Bitcoin – or so believes James Howells, after accidentally lying off the album in 2013.
And now, after years of fighting in court against local authorities to recover the hard drive, Howells has a new plan: simply buying the trash.
“I am considering buying the landfill. Guaranteed financing ”, echoing his comments that were widely disclosed in the British media, although he did not say who would finance the purchase.
CNN tried to contact Howells to comment on the matter.
Howells tried almost everything to access the Docksway landfill in Newport, a 19 -kilometer city northeast of the Cardiff capital, including offering the Newport City Hall more than 70 million euros in 2021 to obtain permission to excavate the site.
Aerial view of the docksway landfill in Newport in Wales. Dimitris Legakis/Athena Pictures/Shutterstock
His last plan arises after a British Supreme Court judge from having prevented his case from judgment, issuing a sentence in January that rejected his attempts to force the council to allow him to searches the landfill.
Howells accidentally lay out a hard drive in August 2013, when he was cleaning his home, thinking it was an empty disc that contained data. He put him in a trash bag he left in the hallway so that his then partner would take him to the trash, before he realized, as the value of Bitcoin was fooling.
Since then, the value of Bitcoin that Howells says he is charged on the hard album has fired from about nine million euros to almost 800 million euros as cryptocurrency prices have fired in recent years.
Each bitcoin transaction requires a private key, a secret data contained in each individual bitcoin wallet that mathematically proves that the transaction comes from this portfolio.
Howell’s hard drive contains “a record” of this private key, wrote Judge Andrew Keyser in his sentence issued in January.
“The position is no different, in principle, than it would be if the registration of the private key had been written on a piece of paper that had been placed in the landfill,” Keyser added.
Without the private key, Howells cannot access Bitcoin that extracted so many years ago, when cryptocurrency was little known beyond the technology world.
Newport City Council, which plans to end the landfill by 2026, according to local press, declined to comment. The municipality had told CNN in 2021 that it was not allowed to dig to the place.
“The advice told Mr. Howells on several occasions that excavation is not possible under our licensing license and the excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area,” said a spokeswoman at the time.
“The cost of digging landfill, storing and treating waste could rise to millions of pounds – without any guarantee of finding the hard disk or still being in operation.”
*Lianne Kolirin contributed to this article
