In 2013, James Howells’ ex-partner threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins, now worth in excess of £750m. Having pleaded with – and sued – Newport council to let him comb through the rubbish dump where he believes it’s located, he is now considering a radical new option: buying the landfill.
IT-worker James Howells insists it isn’t just about the money.
Recovering the 8,000 coins from a hard drive that his ex-partner mistakenly took to the skip 2013 would, of course, be gratifying.
But as well as the potential bounty contained somewhere within a 100,000-ton pile of domestic waste in south east Wales, there is a more powerful motivating force behind his 12-year struggle. One that has propelled him to engage in a over decade of futile pleading with Newport city council officials; devise a zany AI-powered, reality television-inspired rubbish scanning system; and lodge a legal claim that has been been elevated to the second-highest court in the land.
“It’s a about proving a point,” he tells City AM shortly after his protracted battle was thrust once more back into the limelight. “It’s about the principle.”
Having had a case at the High Court thrown out by a judge in January, Howells is currently preparing for a showdown with Newport council at the Court of Appeal in six months’ time.
The legal face off has all the raw material for a hit ITV drama. But Howells’ burning desire to “prove a point” means he is also now weighing up a new phase in what he sees as a David v Goliath struggle to retrieve a fortune that may or may not still be in tact: an avenue which he openly concedes is a near-final throw of the dice.
Backed by a consortium of investors, he will try and give his local council an offer they can’t refuse.
“The hard drive is now so valuable,” he says, “that there is actually now the option to buy the landfill from the council.”
James Howells speaking outside court
James Howells’ costly mistake
The genesis of Howells’ crusade dates back to 2010.
The forward-thinking, arch-libertarian tech worker had read about a newfangled digital currency on an online forum, and it instantly appealed.
The blockchain-based currency was wholly independent from governments and central banks that had, in Howells’ eyes, just crossed the Rubicon of what was right and wrong. Still reeling from the great financial crash, they had resorted – in his words – to “printing money out of nowhere” in an attempt stave off economic ruin but which had pulled away any last pretence that mainstream gatekeepers of major economies would play by the rules.
So Howells went about ‘mining’ for this new currency, awareness of which had not yet extended beyond the sort of niche online chatrooms where he had stumbled across it himself. And he quickly amassed over 8,000 so-called ‘coins’, stashing the digital ‘key’ he needed to access them on a hard drive.
That all-important drive sat in a cupboard for three years until, in 2013, his now-ex-partner took it to the skip as part of a clear out. Howells says she “had no idea” it contained the only means to access his stash of bitcoin, which by then was worth a ‘mere’ £500,000.
Howells’ ensuing struggle to retrieve that hard drive from Newport city council has been as attritional as it has been painstaking for the intensely motivated and highly articulate 39-year-old.
And having been ignored and swatted aside by council workers for over a decade, he will not, he vows, take the latest blow handed to him by a High Court judge in January, “lying down”.
“I’m currently focused on the appeal, and all the documentation for that is in,” he tells City AM. “I’m just waiting for a court date.”
That case – which he originally tabled towards the end of last year – is set to determine whether Newport Council should be obliged to let him and an excavation team trawl through the dump with their permission.
Howells argues that just as a metal detectorist can ask permission to search a farmer’s field for physical treasure – giving the land owner a prearranged share should they discover anything valuable – so too should he be able to comb through a pile of rubbish south of the A48, promising the council and Newport locals some of its spoils.
The defence disagreed on two main grounds. Represented by James Goudie KC, Newport argued that the landfill was critical to the city’s residents, with disruption from Howells’ search affecting their ability to dispose of the area’s domestic waste safely and efficiently. They also claimed Howells’ offer to donate 10 per cent of the bitcoin to the council was tantamount to bribery. Howells’ offer was, Goudie argued, encouraging the council to “play fast and loose” by urging them to “sign up to a share of the action”.
But since Judge Keyser KC handed down his verdict last month, a development has led Howells to believe that these arguments have been shown to be at best ill-informed and at worst, misleading. Earlier this month, Newport council announced plans to close and cap the landfill site, bringing into question its supposed importance to the area’s residents.
“They told the judge that this was a critical piece of infrastructure and it would be detrimental to the people of Newport if we close it,” he says, incensed. “And what do you know, two months later they announce they’re closing it.”
He also sharply refutes the “out of order” accusations of bribery to boot. “A bribe is something that’s done in secret behind closed doors, isn’t it?” he asks.
A new approach
As well as, in his eyes, bolstering the argument he plans to make in the appeal case, the closure plan has also opened the door to his back-up strategy to buy the land off the council. And established backers – comprising “hedge funds, Middle-Eastern investors… and family offices” – are, Howells says, queueing up to offer to fund the IT worker’s up-front costs for a slice of the reward that could lie within the tons of domestic waste.
What’s more, there’s a “win, win” argument that he believes is on his side. Having taken the decision to close the landfill, Newport city council have certain environmental hoops through which to hop. Like any landfill owner, they are now obliged to satisfy decades of strict monitoring and upkeep, known in the industry as ‘after care’ or ‘maintenance costs’ to ensure toxic and damaging chemicals don’t leech into the surrounding area.
This is not a cheap undertaking; likely to cost Newport city council millions over the coming decades. But James Howells has an alternative. “I want to take on a five-year excavation, which I can pay for and I will complete to the highest of standards.
“At the end of that five-year process, what do we have? An empty landfill. So there is no need for a 40-year maintenance plan, and no material left to contaminate the area.”
In such a scenario, he claims he’d save Newport council £25 million and have cleaned up the the landfill. The bonus? “I would also have got to search for my hard drive and potentially recover the Bitcoin in the process,” he says.
Bitcoin gates open
Entirely predictably, Howells has concocted an equally eccentric plan for if and when he is eventually allowed to get digging.
Inspired by the popular television programme Gold Rush Alaska, the 39 year old would, he says, take a forward-loaded dumper truck that would wade through the waste material – giant bucket by giant bucket – and feed it into a “hopper, feeder, shaker-type unit” that would sort different materials onto a conveyor belt.
That’s not all. The material would then be passed through AI-powered Lidar scanners that are trained to identify a hard drive object. At which point the 99.9 per cent of waste which isn’t flagged as a potential store of nearly a billion pounds would pass through a manual sorting system, much like in a recycling plant, before being taken off site for treatment and incineration.
“Then we’ve got another AI station,” Howells says. “We’ve got an overhead magnetic band. Still with me?”. Your correspondent was just about keeping up.
“Basically, if I want to find a needle in a haystack,” he continues, sensing his interviewer needed the dumbed down version. “I need to go through every single piece of hay.”
Cyrptopia in south Wales
One would be forgiven for thinking that, given the ordeal through which it has put him and the complex legal and landfill strategies he’s had to devise, James Howells might have become something of a bitcoin sceptic. It has, after all, forced him to endure years of psychological torture.
But like any true ideologue, his fervour for the currency remains undimmed. If anything, it burns even brighter for the fact that there is no short cut to retrieving his fortune.
“Just because I’m involved in a bad situation, doesn’t mean bitcoin is going to fail,” he says. “The fundamentals of bitcoin are sound and safe. The fundamentals of the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England are not.”
The source of such zeal comes from one of bitcoin’s foundational principles. Like a precious metal, there is only a finite amount of it in digital existence. And as time goes on, and more are discovered, it gets harder and and more power-intensive, to ‘discover’ them.
In stark contrast, cash remains at the whims of, in Howells’ eyes, untrustworthy and irresponsible central banks. “2008 was a ‘black swan’ event – they printed money,” he says. “Covid was a ‘black swan’ event – they printed money. The next so-called black swan event happens, what do you think they’ll do? They’ll print more money.”
Bitcoin is the only rational counterbalance to states’ addiction to debasing their currency in Howells eyes, and he feels obliged to spread the word through his native Wales should he salvage his digital fortune.
“I want to use the wealth to transform South Wales into a crypto hub,” he says, laying out a vision where all the area’s local businesses are set up to accept crypto, its local schools host cryptocurrency education programmes, and its high streets boast permanent walk-in blockchain surgeries.
One senses, given the enthusiasm with which he lays out his lofty vision, that on top of the financial reward and sticking it to an intransigent council, this moral mission is a third driving factor in James Howells’ crusade. Or, as he puts it: “It would be like teaching the people of South Wales how to fish.”
For now, though, his pipe dream remains just that. And before any of it can come to fruition, there are the small matters of winning a landmark court battle, sorting through 100,000 tons of rubbish and finding a hard drive worth £769m.
But far more important than any of that: he also needs to prove a point.