After 13 years of unsuccessful attempts, the man who disposed of a hard drive with around 600 million euros in Bitcoin has to give up [Best of GameStar]

Under mountains of rubbish in Wales there is a particularly valuable treasure in the form of a laptop hard drive – if the data on it could even be saved. (Source: stock.adobe.com – aryfahmed, Wikipedia)

There are many options surrounding the extreme rise in the price of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin If only I had known that…-mind games.

No wonder, after all, the currency, which was first created in 2009, has worked its way up from a value of one dollar in 2011 to currently just over 74,000 euros per Bitcoin.

It is therefore understandable that Welshman James Howells has made numerous efforts to recover his Bitcoin hard drive, which he accidentally threw away in 2013.

The most important facts about the case

• The hard drive comes from a laptop and is said to contain a key (i.e. the password) to a wallet with an impressive 8,000 Bitcoin. At the current rate, this corresponds to a value of around 592 million euros.
• The problem: It is somewhere under huge mountains of rubbish in a landfill site in Newport, near Cardiff. Howells actually wanted to dispose of an empty hard drive, but over thirteen years ago he chose the wrong model.
• A court ruling at the beginning of 2025 was against Howells, so the Newport City Council won (via Ars Technica). Howells is therefore not allowed to make any effort to find the hard drive in the landfill.

In mid-2022, Howells still had hope Rescue attempts with the help of robot dogs in collaboration with an artificial intelligence specialist (GameStar reported). But he never received the appropriate permit for this.

Environmental protection as a counterargument

Howells’ lawsuit against Newport City Council included three possible resolution scenarios:

1. The defendant hands the hard drive over to the plaintiff.
2. The defendant pays compensation equal to the value of the Bitcoins that the plaintiff can no longer access.
3. The defendant allows the plaintiff to excavate the landfill with the help of a team of experts in order to locate the hard drive himself.

The first solution is eliminated as long as no one knows exactly where the hard drive is located.

That the second solution Howells himself is probably aware that this would not seem appropriate to any court.

Against the third solution Last but not least, the city council states, among other things, that digging the landfill could cause harmful substances to escape into the environment.

And then there is another crucial sticking point: ownership.

Who owns the hard drive?

From the court’s perspective, by throwing away the hard drive, Howells no longer has any ownership rights to the hard drive. This is in Control of Pollution Act from 1974, i.e. in one Anti-pollution law.

Howell’s attempts to fight back are unsuccessful in court, with the judge giving the following reasoning in the ruling:

To make matters worse, Howells only took legal action in 2024, while the situation has been largely unchanged and known to him since 2013.

In this case, however, a limitation period of six years applies, which means it already expired in 2019.

Hope was slim anyway

In conclusion, one may doubt whether Howells could ever have been successful.

On the one hand, it is questionable whether the data could even be saved after such a long time. After all, the hard drive has been buried under ever-increasing mountains of garbage for over a decade, plagued by compression processes.

On the other hand, the search in the landfill with 350,000 tons of waste is like looking for the famous needle in a haystack (even though in 2013 an area of ​​around 2,000 square meters with around 15,000 tons of waste was identified in which the hard drive was located probably located).

Even though Howells has now stopped the search, it is clear that the lost hard drive will remain a part of the Welshman’s life: Over the last year, not only a series about his search project was announced, but also a computer game.

The search was on shaky ground from the start. With every year that passes, it becomes increasingly unlikely that the hard drive will turn up in usable form. However, it is not in sight that the Welshman will end the matter.

Even though he may have given up hope of earning several hundred million in one fell swoop, the legendary Bitcoin unlucky person is constantly working on becoming lucky.