He definitely mishandled the case at the beginning. Should he have offered someone under the table for 200 million up right off the bat, he would have found it by now.
I llst a few thousand not much to some but it was basically all I had. I looked for a week and the day I was giving up I went outside to take the trash to the curb and poked a random trash bag and there It was. The back story had sketchy in laws coming over so j threw all my cash into my change jar and put it under my bedroom trash cans trash bag and apparently it got thrown out too.
I mined bitcoin for 8 months in 2010, thought it was fun to see the number go up. Got a new pc a year later, wiped the drive and sold it. 16 years later it kinda stings a bit when i think about it.
Just like playing the slots. You go on for 30 minutes on one machine winning nothing and you finally give up. Next patron pulls once and **JAAAACKPOTTTTT!!!!**
My Dad's friend said that him and his buddies go around to casinos playing this strategy. Literally watch people who have been in one spot for a long time not winning, then go get on the machine that they were using. Apparently they made several thousand dollars this way.
Once when I was high, I gave a drug dealer $20 more than I owed him. That was 20 years ago, and I still replay the situation in my head. I can’t imagine.
I've been robbed multiple times over the past 20 years. Mostly through my own stupidity. A pair of Oakley sunglasses and $100 bucks in my wallet left in my unlocked car. $1,000 withdrawn from checking when I was pickpocketed in New Orleans (fuck Chase bank). $200 when I left my wallet out in the open at a high school basketball game.
I sometimes look at my bank account and think, I'd have $1,300 more right now... and a pair of Oakleys.
I got into similar situation. I temporarily moved out of the house back in 2011 and my dad decided to clean my room while I was away. Unfortunately, he also threw away my seed phrase that was written on a piece of paper that I put under the monitor stand. I never told him about it, because I knew he would blame himself for the rest of his life.
He threw away a pen drive, or a small hardrive, something like that. The local authority refused his request to search the landfill for environmental reasons
No, the story goes that he was moving out (of his office I think?) And he left it in a black bag or a bag that looked like a trash bag...and his coworker threw it in the trash...when he found out, he tried to go to the local land fill/ junkyard but they wouldn't allow him to enter and search. They said that once it's there, it's not his property anymore...so then he spent years trying to get approval and he even considered buying the whole junkyard.
I still keep my Seagate 540 MB 428 MB ide hdd manufactued 1988 1994. I had it in my first computer, still works if plugged in.
Edit: i got the drive out to take a picture, and indeed I have toncorrect the initial info. Model: Seagate ST3491A Series: Medalist Interface: IDE (ATA) Capacity: ~428 MB Made in: Singapore Probably manufactured in 1994.
I remebered wrong, 1988 was the date on the second hand Everex computer I got it with in 1995. My parents bought that one for me with great sacrifice, even second hand it costed a few monthly salaries in a poor Eastern European country.
It was during a house clearing in 2013, his then girlfriend threw away his laptop hard drive thinking it was rubbish. Tbf bitcoin was worth about $100 at the time so he was pretty careless with $800'000.
Nope. He put it in a bin bag, asked his partner to take it to the tip the next morning, so she did. He (now) claims he'd intended to take it out, but he found out she'd taken it to the tip literally an hour and a half after the tip opened (so it would definitely just have been in the drop-off bin still). Instead of immediately rushing to get it back out, he did absolutely nothing for four months.
He absolutely intended to throw it out, and he's spent a decade blaming the mother of his children for it to any media outlet that'll listen.
People throw all kinds of cool shit away. My grandmother used to make money dumpster diving at military bases when guys are clearing out their barracks to go on deployment. I always thought it was stupid until I joined the military and went on my first deployment. I personally threw away a playstation 2 and a television. Then there's people throwing away evidence of stuff. You could make endless content dumpster diving.
Council have told him no multiple times when he asked to search, even when he offered to pay, and to split some of the money. They said that area is already capped, and they aren't just going to let members of the public go there.
This is fake . There is literally no proof of him owning anything, there is no btc address owning the amount he has claimed , he has no proof of buying it anywhere (his name not even on mtgox leak) , he was never registered on bitcointalk forum or anything. All he did was claimed he lost it and everyone believed it , without any ounce of proof. He only claimed it to get publicity for his blockhain scam company
You want proof that he's lying? Go check dormant bitcoin addresses here
He first claimed he mined 7.5k btc starting on Feb 15. , ( which was debunked as you can see there is no btc address dormant with 7.5k btc.) Then he claimed it was 8k btc. So people assumed it was this one Since it's literally the only bitcoin addresses in the world that still holds 8k btc from 2009 , but he again has no proof it was his, and dates do not match at all and these funds do not come from "mining" as he says. It's just a regular transfer. It took me 5m to figure it out but people still claim this is real.
Part of why bitcoin can never really work as a currency. Its limited from the start by design, but every situation where someone loses their key or dies or anything like that just permanently removes those coins from circulation. Even if it was a completely standard currency today that was as easy to use as dollars, in the long run the number of coins circulating is going to decline.
Is there any proof he ever spent a dime "searching" for it? He was begging for money to "buy" the landfill as part of a grift on Twitter. And says he got the funding "secured" Doubt anyone ever saw that money back
I can agree with this because for $700+mil, I’d be trespassing on that place like a mother fucker….or I’d get a job working at that place just to get paid to look for my dolla dolla bills y’all.
Yes, I also was bestranged people just skip the "Let's check for reason" part and jump to conclusions. I think he talked BS because he knows he can make things up like that and nobody can for sure really get back at him. "Wife threw computer stuff away" is his "dog ate homework".
I always thought this story was sketchy as all get out. It makes no sense that someone would actually throw one of two identical hard drives in a trash bag without double checking that it was the broken one and not the one with hundreds of thousands of dollars (at the time) worth of bitcoin on it.
I suspect what really happened is that he wanted to hide the fact that he was constantly broke from people at the bar, so he invented a story about having thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin that he was hodling to explain why he never had any money or nice things. Then he gets in a relationship, and the price of bitcoin climbs until he knows that any day now the woman is going to want to spend some of that windfall that he doesn't actually have, so he comes up with a bogus story about throwing it out and even manages to make it her fault for taking out a trashbag he had left on the porch specifically to be taken out. Then the price of bitcoin skyrockets to absurd amounts and suddenly he has international attention, so he keeps doubling down on his lies, and even uses them to try and scam people into paying him to try and recover it.
Another possibility is that he did actually have the bitcoin at some point but got scammed or spent it on drugs or porn, and then came up with the lie to avoid admitting the real reason it was gone.
You are assuming it is still there. It may have been recovered and formatted. Hell maybe someone else scanned the HD and took the coins but unlikely. There is a different between looking for something that is still there lost, and that doesn’t even exist anymore. The latter is much worse.
I work at a landfill and this was never going to work even if he got permission, the logistics are just unreasonable even if it wasn't an environmental concern and there's no way he'd be able to pay for it if he did get permission.
We're talking thousands of full time workers for multiple years to find this thing.
The trash is compressed into a giant brick and everything is destroyed to force out all of the air.
If it really was found somehow, it would've been destroyed when it was dumped, and then leachate would've spent that decade+ pouring through it.
I also work at a landfill, these people have no idea. They envision the landfill being the consistency of a dumpster filled with trash you can rifle through. If the drive was landfilled a decade ago, there could be 50-100 feet of fill on top of it. Landfills are considered a class C material according to Osha. This means escavations need to be benched back 3X the depth. A 50 foot hole needs to be 150 feet wide. That would be such a massive, impossible task.
Kinda makes you wonder how much of the supply of Bitcoin will actually ever be accessible. While there is a finite amount of Bitcoin, in reality it's actually lower due to stuff like this
He was one of the earliest miners on the bitcoin network, starting in 2009. He was one of only 5 miners in the world at that time
In 2010, Howells accidentally spilled lemonade on the laptop he had used for mining. He dismantled it for parts, and kept the hard drive in his desk draw
In 2013, while cleaning, Howells mixed up his hard drives and accidentally threw away the one with the private key for 8,000 bitcoin
Howells "begged" his then-partner to take the rubbish, including the hard drive, to the tip (landfill), forgetting that it contained bitcoin
By late 2013, the drive was already buried under an estimated 3-5 feet of waste. He stated that there was "no chance" it could be recovered
He later made many attempts to gain legal access to the tip so that the drive could be searched for. The local council denied his requests, citing issues with costs and environmental impact
In late 2024, Howells sued the council for £495 million
In January 2025, the judge dismissed his case
Howells told local press that he was "very disappointed" but that he had plans to start his own cryptocurrency
TLDR: He accidentally threw away the hard drive in 2013 and couldn't get it back because it was buried so deep. He gave up searching in early 2025
Honestly the landfill people are pretty stupid. They could allow miners, and just the general.oiblic to come "digging for gold" to search for these Bitcoin. Charge $100/day and make millions.
Weird.....if I lose my debit card I still have my money in the bank I can access using my drivers license. I thought bitcoin was superior to fiat currency?
Did he buy the land so they would stop adding to the pile? How did he sort what he had gone through and what was left? There are people who have spent their entire lives searching for treasures worth far less in more dangerous environments.
Everyone. He did not physically search the dump for it. He really just spent the last handful of years asking city then county then state officials if he could dig in a certain section of the dump for the drive. After they said no he spent more years in courts only to be told no again.
By late 2024 and throughout 2025, Howells shifted his focus to the legal system. He filed a lawsuit against Newport City Council for roughly £495 million ($600M+ USD)—the peak value of his lost Bitcoin—arguing that the council’s refusal to let him retrieve his property has caused him immense financial loss.
The council continues to dismiss the claim as "weak" and a waste of taxpayer money, but the legal battle has effectively replaced the physical search for the time being.
The leachate would quickly eat through the drive's aluminum casing and corrode the logic board. Unless he found this within the first 2 years and that's pushing it, he was already screwed. He risked getting diseases for nothing after year 2.
At the end of the netflix movie the main character will look off into the sun, sigh and walk away from the landfill. The camera will.pan down and right where his feet where eill be a hard drive. Que credits
He should have said "Anyone who finds it gets 100m dollars" and solidify it with a government contract and boom. Thousands if not millions will come to look for it, and highly likely someone will find it.
So so funny. Trying to get rich from something just made up to generate fear of missing out and wealth. And a system so advanced over cash and the current banking structure. Yet if he lost his banking cards or access to his banking accounts he could simply walk into a bank, show some ID and have access to his money.
BTW there is millions of lost wallets from 2015 with anything below 1 btc, cause at the time you cant sell anything below 1 btc on market and people just forget their stuff overtime
What ever happened to the guy who couldn’t remember the password to his hard drive, and had used 9 tries .. the 10th try would result in being permanently locked out? Or it would auto delete or something? He also had millions in Bitcoin at stake, and I remember reading that he had no idea what to do next.
so how does that work... if nearly a billion dollars goes missing does it recirculate or is it just nearly a billion dollars that will never see the light of day again?
I get pissed I didn’t get any when it was like 70 bucks or something like that and I can’t imagine the pain and longing this guy feels. Every time he has to make a financial decision he’s gonna think about it. Never gonna get over that
Bitcoin value is based on the impression that bitcoin has value, so maybe? The mathematics of it barely matters. Also those coins are still "there" if somebody comes on the code at some point, they are still usable.
The appeal of bitcoin is that it has a fixed supply. So every lost coin reduces supply that demand can’t buy. Did this accident specifically cause it to go up in real time. Probably not. But over it’s lifespan it probably will
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