Landfill where man tossed $780M in Bitcoin set to close after years of recovery attempts

The saga of the hard drive with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin in it lost in a UK landfill is about to end.

This means one man’s decade-long battle to recover said hard drive is also likely to end.

What’s more, it won’t be a happy ending.

We’re looking at 8,000BTC lost forever.

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The story behind the famous 8,000 BTC hard drive

James Howells is a UK IT worker and early Bitcoin adopter who lost 8,000BTC after accidentally ditching the hard drive containing the (digital) keys to his Bitcoin wallet.

Without getting too technical, Bitcoin itself isn’t stored in the hard drive, it’s stored on the blockchain online but this man had stored the keys to access his stack in the hard drive that was accidentally tossed away.

There are no copies of those keys, and no one can retrieve them for him.

Different stories have been given through the years, but it appears that the hard drive was accidentally chucked away by Howells’ former partner years ago.

Still, how the hard drive was misplaced, and who misplaced it, really doesn’t change the outcome, because said hard drive is what lies between him and a fortune worth, at the time of writing, $785 million.

This guy tried everything, from employing robot-dogs to suing the council, but nothing worked.

In 2025, the High Court of Newport dismissed Howells’ claim, citing ‘very significant negative impact on the surrounding environment’ and ruling that it had no prospects of success.

Now, the council will put an end to the saga because the UK landfill will be shut down.

“The landfill has been in operation since the early 2000s and is nearing the end of its life, so the council is planning to close and cap the landfill over the next two years,” a Newport council spokesperson told the BBC.

These people lost a fortune in Bitcoin

Unfortunately for him, Howells will join the long list of people who lost fortunes in Bitcoin through the years.

We’ve heard several stories about people who had access to stacks of Bitcoin worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, but eventually lost everything or gave it up.

The one thing they all had in common, which is also why we shouldn’t blame them, is they were all early adopters, and no one could’ve predicted this over a decade ago.

So when these things actually happened, Bitcoin was worth pennies, or sometimes a fraction of a penny.

The most famous ‘incident’ happened in 2010, when a man in Florida, Laszlo Hanyecz, ordered two large pizzas from Papa John’s and used 10,000 bitcoins to pay for his $40 order.

For the record, 10,000 BTC today would be worth close to $1 billion.

To this day, crypto enthusiasts celebrate May 22 as ‘Bitcoin Pizza Day’.

Hanyecz has always been very open about the whole thing, and he said he never regretted it because his ‘sacrifice’, if we wanted to call it that, proved, for the first time, that BTC could be used as currency.