Buried deep in a Welsh landfill, beneath layers of years-old garbage, there is a hard drive that holds the key to almost $800 million in bitcoin – or so James Howells believes, after accidentally throwing the drive away in 2013.

James Howells has begged officials to let him dig through a South Wales landfill to find a lost Bitcoin wallet that he says is worth around $800 million.

In 2022, Howells said if he can’t go into the dump, he’ll send Boston Dynamics robotic dogs to do the digging for him. That was part of a larger, $11 million business plan in which he proposed spending three years excavating the landfill to find his hard drive, while also turning the site into a mining facility. Newport did not go for that, either.

A Welsh landfill site where 8,000 Bitcoins are thought to be buried will be repurposed, at least partly, into a solar farm - but the man who lost the haul has other plans.

Howells sued the city of Newport, Wales, in October 2024 for the right to search the landfill or pay him £495 million ($607 million) in compensation.

A computer engineer who believes his Bitcoin hard drive worth nearly £600m is buried in a landfill is now considering buying the entire site to find it. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

British IT worker James Howells plans to buy a landfill in Newport, South Wales, to recover a hard drive containing Bitcoin worth nearly Rs 6,500 crore. He lost the device in 2013 after his then-partner mistakenly threw it away.