The decade old Bitcoin buried in landfill saga has grown deeper after as 36-year-old IT engineer from Newport sues the local council. The Newport City Council barred James Howells from excavating a landfill to try and retrieve a hard drive he accidentally discarded, which had records of his 8,000 Bitcoins.
Despite making several attempts to access the lost Bitcoin in a landfill, Wales Online reports that Howells has met resistance from the council, which has continuously denied him permission to excavate the site. Howells is now seeking $647M in damages for the denial of access to the site, where he believes the hard drive was buried together with his garbage.
City Council Won’t Budge
The saga surrounding James Howells’s lost Bitcoins started in 2013. He accidentally discarded a hard drive containing keys to his Bitcoin during a household clear-out. The stash of Bitcoin in his hard drive should have been worth at least one million pounds, but over ten years, it should now be worth over half a billion pounds. The IT engineer has since then made several attempts to get back his hard drive from the landfill, but the Newport City Council has continuously denied him access, leading to the current high-profile lawsuit.
The Newport City Council continues to rebuff Howells’s proposal to dig up the landfill to retrieve his lost Bitcoin, citing environmental issues. According to the council, the landfill reportedly contains a high level of hazardous materials, specifically methane gas, arsenic, and waste asbestos. Despite Howell’s offering to surrender at least 10 percent of the stash should he recover the lost Bitcoin in the landfill, the council insists that digging up any part of the landfill could lead to an environmental disaster.
Use Artificial Intelligence
Howells hasn’t spared any efforts in trying to recover his Bitcoin buried in landfill. Sometime in 2022, the IT guru offered at least £8M to use high-tech robots to rummage through over 110,000 tons of garbage to locate his hard drive. He made it clear that he would fund the project personally and that the council would not spend a dime. Nonetheless, the New Port City Council never bought the idea, citing feasibility and legal issues surrounding Howell’s project.
In his latest proposal, Howell intended to utilize an Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology-operated mechanical arm to filter the garbage in the hope of picking up his long-lost hard drive. Under his plan, he would have hired several environmental and data recovery gurus who would employ robotic dogs as security to prevent any probability of anyone else stealing his elusive device.
Howells indicated then that while excavating for the bitcoin lost in landfill would have been a mammoth project, he had secured funding and was certain that AI technology would have come to his rescue. Howell estimated that the search would have taken up to 12 months and hoped he would get a license from the Newport City Council.
Highest Ever Valuation
Since Howells discovered he had lost a fortune in the lost Bitcoin in landfill, the IT guru has been engaged in a lengthy legal battle with the Newport City Council. Unfortunately, the local authority has systematically rejected all his efforts to gain access to the landfill site. Howell’s legal team has drafted many letters to the council asking that he be allowed to start work to find his lost fortune but to no avail. He may not yet be as lucky as others who have recovered their lost crypto, to date, James Howells loss of Bitcoin remains the highest-ever valuation ever of missing cryptocurrency.
Conclusion
The saga surrounding James Howells’s loss of Bitcoin should serve as a lesson to all crypto investors. While it’s important for anyone intending to store their crypto holdings to accord their hardware wallets securely the highest level of security, it’s more important to keep their private keys and recovery phrases, just in case they lose their gadgets. This remains the only way to avoid such sad losses as James Howells’s.
