\n<\/p>\n
What James Howells wants to do is, by his account, simple: buy a landfill, excavate tens of thousands of tons of trash, cart every piece by dump truck to a scanner with A.I.-trained detection technology, install a backup magnetic belt to pick up any lingering metallic objects and, thus, find the long-lost hard drive that contains his mistakenly discarded Bitcoin key, worth somewhere around $800 million.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis seems logical,\u201d Mr. Howells said of his plan.<\/p>\n
For more than a decade, Mr. Howells has begged, negotiated and pleaded with anyone \u2014 most often, the Newport City Council, in South Wales \u2014 to get access to the mountains of waste in pursuit of his crypto White Whale: a hard drive that was accidentally thrown away in 2013.<\/p>\n
He has secured a data recovery firm and an excavator. He has enlisted the former landfill director to map out the site. He has taken the case to court, to no avail. The city has so far refused to let him excavate the landfill, and is planning to close the site for good.<\/p>\n
Now, in what may be the final stage of his Pequodian journey, Mr. Howells has one final ask of the Newport City Council: If it won\u2019t let him dig up the place, let him buy it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cSeems like a better plan for me and the city,\u201d said Mr. Howells, who envisions clearing out the trash and converting the site to a park, or perhaps making it a dump site again. \u201cThe landfill gets cleaned. I get to dig for my hard drive.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In Mr. Howells\u2019 plight is both the universal and the sensational. Who among us hasn\u2019t accidentally tossed something of value? How many have tried, however fruitlessly, to get it back?<\/p>\n
The potential value of Mr. Howells\u2019 error raises a trickier question, too: Who owns our trash once it\u2019s gone, especially when it\u2019s worth more than half a billion dollars?<\/p>\n
The circumstances that led Mr. Howells to this juncture are well<\/a> documented<\/a>. A computer science analyst, he was cleaning out his office sometime in 2013 when he carelessly left a hard drive among a pile of rubbish earmarked for the dump. A miscommunication with his partner at the time led to the drive being gathered up and taken to the landfill.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n What Mr. Howells didn\u2019t realize then was that the hard drive \u2014 a backup from an old gaming computer \u2014 contained the only copy of his 51-character private key, used to access Bitcoin wallets. Mr. Howell had mined cryptocurrency as a hobbyist in the late 2000s, back when it was mostly useless.<\/p>\n It was months later when Mr. Howells realized the stakes of the error: His once-modest Bitcoin wallet was worth millions. He has been trying to get the drive back ever since, hoping that, even after 12 years, some of the disc might be salvageable.<\/p>\n Standing in his way is the Newport City Council, which says the elusive hard drive belongs to the city anyway, even if it were to be recovered. (It hasn\u2019t been, and according to the city, any attempt to do so would come at a prohibitively high cost.) A judge has backed the council.<\/a> Mr. Howells insists the drive is still legally his, arguing that it was technically discarded without his permission by a third party. He even offered to split the Bitcoin fortune with the city,<\/a> but was rejected.<\/p>\n Mr. Howells\u2019 desperate, yearslong search isn\u2019t a surprise to experts in the cryptocurrency world, where fortunes are fleeting and one small, poorly-timed decision can separate winners from losers.<\/p>\n \u201cGenerally speaking, the experience of quite a number of people involved in crypto assets has been, maybe not as drastic as this, but quite similar,\u201d said Iwa Salami, a professor of fintech regulation at the Royal Docks School of Business and Law, University of East London. \u201cThe industry is one that can leave people with regrets, particularly when you sell or buy cryptoassets at the wrong time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Critics and the Newport City Council have called Mr. Howells\u2019 pursuit a fool\u2019s errand, a journey of towering stakes with no guarantee that a 12-year-old, buried disc is even findable, let alone readable. But Mr. Howells says the numbers alone make searching the proverbial haystack worthwhile.<\/p>\n \u201cThis needle is very, very, very valuable \u2014 $800 million,\u201d Mr. Howells said of the hard drive. \u201cWhich means I\u2019m willing to search every piece of hay in order to find the needle.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Howells\u2019 last-ditch effort comes after he lost a case in Britain\u2019s High Court seeking to force the Newport City Council to let him excavate the dump. A judge said the wild hard drive chase had \u201cno realistic prospect of succeeding,\u201d even if taken to a higher court.<\/p>\n Not long after, the city announced plans to close and cap the site, a fact Mr. Howells says should have been disclosed in the recent court proceedings. Regardless, he believes his proposal to buy the site would save the city money in the long run.<\/p>\n \u201cThey haven\u2019t said they\u2019re willing to sell it,\u201d Mr. Howells acknowledged, before citing a string of regulatory statutes and budget projections that he says suggest the city ought to.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The Newport City Council declined to comment further on the matter, including about whether it would seriously consider Mr. Howells\u2019 offer. A spokesperson for the office pointed to a statement from 2023, which said: \u201cWe have been very clear and consistent in our responses that we cannot assist Mr. Howells in this matter. Our position has not changed.\u201d<\/p>\n Those who study crypto markets \u2014 and the psychology behind them \u2014 didn\u2019t expect the obstacles to stop Mr. Howells.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s human, isn\u2019t it?\u201d Ms. Salami said. She laughed, recalling a recent instance in which she herself had misplaced a contact lens moments before an important event. She had searched furiously, even tearing through the trash to find it. Imagine, she said, if it had been worth half a billion dollars.<\/p>\n \u201cSome people can walk away and move on, and count it as a loss,\u201d she said. \u201cSome people will just not be able to move on.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n