James Howells, who dumped a hard drive containing $780 million worth of Bitcoin, wants to buy a landfill in Wales before it closes.
A landfill in Wales where James Howells lost a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoins is set to close in 2025-2026. According to Tom's Hardware, the Newport City Council plans to develop a solar farm on the site. Therefore, Howells is proposing to buy the landfill to keep it as it is.
“If the city council is willing, I might be interested in buying the site,” Howells said, adding that he has discussed the plan with several partners. His group previously said it would cost $13 million to dig through the landfill over 36 months to find the hard drives, while the estimated cost of the land was higher.
Howells, a 39-year-old former IT engineer from Wales, changed his life in 2013. “I had two identical hard drives in a drawer. One had no data, the other had the private key to 8,000 Bitcoins. I was going to throw the empty hard drive away, but I made a mistake,” he said.
For more than 10 years, Howells has been trying to get permission to dig up the landfill, but local authorities are concerned that it will harm the environment. The former engineer admits that digging through 110,000 tons of trash is an impossible task, but he has raised $13 million from venture capital to launch the project if it gets permission.
Howells has also assembled eight experts in AI, landfill excavation, waste management, and data extraction, including an advisor who worked for a company that recovered data from the black boxes of the space shuttle Columbia. The experts will be contracted to carry out the mining process and receive a reward if the Bitcoins are successfully retrieved.