Man who lost 8,000 Bitcoin says he’s done digging

James Howells, a computer engineer from Newport, Wales, has finally given up on retrieving a hard drive he claims contains 8,000 Bitcoin — now worth around $890 million — after a 12-year battle with his local council.

In 2013, his ex-girlfriend accidentally threw the drive into a landfill. Since then, he’s spent years trying to convince Newport City Council to let him search the site, once describing the hunt as his “9 to 5.”

Earlier this year, the council announced the landfill would close in the 2025–26 financial year. Howells offered to buy the site in July, making what he called a “multi-million dollar offer,” but says the council never responded. Instead, they told him he owes nearly $149,000 in legal costs from his failed court bids.

Join the discussion with CryptosRUs on Roundtable here.

“We will not be spending any more of our officers’ time on this issue until that payment is made,” the council said in a statement to BBC News.

Howells called this “financial coercion,” accusing the council of blocking a “lawful offer” by tying it to an unrelated debt. “If they don’t wish to sell the site, they should say so clearly,” he told the BBC.

His legal fight has been long and costly. In January, Newport Council asked the High Court to strike out his claim to access the landfill or seek $630 million in compensation. The judge ruled there were no “reasonable grounds” for the case. Howells appealed, representing himself and even using AI to prepare his arguments, but the Court of Appeal rejected it.

Now, he’s moving on. Instead of digging up the landfill, Howells plans to launch a new cryptocurrency called Ceiniog Coin (INI) later this year. It will be backed by the value of his lost Bitcoin wallet — which is publicly verifiable on the blockchain — and act as a “store-of-value” token.