James Howells

James Howells mined thousands of bitcoin on a laptop in his bedroom, back when the currency was worth close to nothing and almost no one else was trying. Twelve years and two failed lawsuits later, he still knows exactly where they are: somewhere inside hundreds of thousands of tonnes of compacted household waste, under a Welsh hillside, in a landfill a court has ruled the discarded drive itself now legally belongs to.

Before the drive: an early miner with no reason to expect this (2008–2009)

Howells, a Welsh IT engineer from Newport, taught himself about Bitcoin in December 2008, a month after the whitepaper’s release, and began studying it seriously the following month. His path into the technology ran through an unlikely day job: working on the Bowman military communications system gave him practical exposure to the encryption concepts Bitcoin’s design depended on. On February 15, 2009, weeks after the network went live, he started mining on a Dell XPS laptop, later describing sessions of 400 to 800 BTC generated intermittently overnight over about two months, before the laptop began overheating and he stopped (the Guardian’s first report, in 2013, said he ran the program for a week). At bitcoin’s price at the time, effectively zero, this was hobbyist tinkering, not investing.

The Guardian’s first report on the loss, in November 2013, put the total at 7,500 BTC; his 2024 claim against the council puts it at 8,000. Either way, the keys sat untouched on the laptop’s hard drive for years, the coins worth too little to think about moving.

Twelve years of asking (2013–2025)

By the time Howells realized which hard drive he had thrown away, it was already buried under months of other household waste at Newport’s Docksway landfill. The mechanics of the loss and the years of informal requests that followed are recorded on their own page; what changed between 2013 and 2024 was mainly the size of the number attached to it, as Bitcoin’s price rose and Howells’s own offers to Newport City Council escalated alongside it — from £7.4 million in 2017, to a quarter of the recovered proceeds (then worth roughly £200 million) in January 2021, to a venture-capital-backed excavation plan budgeted at £10–11 million in 2022. The council refused every version. Its reasons, as the 2025 judgment summarises them, included breaching its permit from Natural Resources Wales, the escape of harmful substances, and the safety of site staff and nearby residents.

In May 2024, with bitcoin trading near its all-time high, Howells converted twelve years of refused requests into a formal lawsuit, seeking either excavation rights or £495 million in damages. On January 9, 2025, His Honour Judge Keyser KC gave summary judgment for the council. He relied on section 14(6)(c) of the Control of Pollution Act 1974, under which anything delivered to the council’s waste facilities belongs to the council, and he held that Howells’s alternative claim, that the council held the drive on trust for him, was out of time, since Howells had known the facts behind it since November 2013. Howells was not merely denied access: the court held that the drive itself had become the council’s property, so whatever he owned in the bitcoin gave him no right to the drive.

He sought permission to appeal; on March 13, 2025, the Court of Appeal refused it, finding no realistic prospect the outcome would change. He called the ruling a “dangerous precedent for property rights” and said he intended to pursue the case at the European Court of Human Rights.

From landfill to token (2025)

The legal defeats did not end the story so much as redirect it. In July 2025, with roughly £117,000 in the council’s legal costs now outstanding against him, Howells submitted a formal £2.5 million offer to buy the section of the landfill he believed held the drive outright — a bid to route around the permit dispute entirely by becoming the landowner. By August, he had abandoned that plan too, telling reporters he was “no longer pursuing” either the purchase or further talks with the council, and unveiled a different project instead: Ceiniog Coin, a token intended to represent the notional value of the buried bitcoin without requiring the drive to ever be recovered.

Significance

Howells did not lose his bitcoin to a hack, a scam, or a stranger’s decision. He threw it away himself, by mistake, the same way anyone might toss out the wrong box during a move — and then spent more than a decade discovering that a mistake, once Bitcoin’s price turns it into a fortune, does not entitle you to undo it. Two courts of England and Wales have now said the same thing in two different ways: the drive is real, its location is not seriously disputed, and none of that adds up to a claim he can enforce.

Stefan Thomas’s bitcoin sits similarly out of reach, behind a forgotten IronKey password rather than a landfill’s legal boundary, and in neither case have the coins come back: Bitcoin doesn’t distinguish between a password you can’t remember and a drive you’re not allowed to dig up. That gap, between where the coins provably are and what the law will let their owner do about it, is a more honest picture of Bitcoin’s irreversibility than any technical failure could be. The ledger did not fail Howells. Everything around it did.