James Howells, a Welsh IT engineer, accidentally threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoin (worth over £500 million to nearly $1 billion as of 2025-2026) in 2013. The drive was discarded during an office cleanup and ended up in the Docksway Landfill in Newport, Wales. Despite over a decade of effort and legal battles to excavate the site, local authorities have denied permission due to environmental and financial concerns.
James Howells has quit his 12-year quest to recover 8,000 Bitcoin from a hard drive that was accidentally binned and sent to a landfill in Newport, Wales. Now, he's launching a Bitcoin L2 that claims to be “backed” by the lost funds, which he says a court recognized his legal ownership of.
He is currently founding a new technology company focused on blockchain solutions and digital security known as Ceiniog Coin.
James Howells accidentally threw away the hard drive that allows him to access his bitcoin. 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, from Newport, who claimed his ex-girlfriend mistakenly threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins in 2013, has given up on retrieving the wallet, currently worth £695m, but has been hit with a £117,000 legal bill from his fight.
Yes, someone really did pay 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas in a historic transaction on May 22, 2010, by programmer Laszlo Hanyecz, marking the first real-world purchase with cryptocurrency and becoming famous as Bitcoin Pizza Day. At the time, those 10,000 BTC were worth about $41, but now (in recent years, as Bitcoin's price has soared) they'd be worth over a billion dollars, demonstrating Bitcoin's massive growth in value.
Unlike traditional banking systems where a lost password might be reset by a central authority, Bitcoin's decentralized design offers no such recovery option. As a result, lost Bitcoin is effectively removed from circulation, reducing the available supply of the cryptocurrency, which is capped at 21 million coins.
There are 450 crypto centimillionaires, or those with crypto holdings of $100 million or more, and 36 crypto billionaires, according to the report. Bitcoin's price has more than doubled over the past year, as the dollar falls and concerns grow over deficits and fiscal spending.
If you had the foresight, or simply the good luck, to have invested $1,000 in Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) a decade ago, and never sold, you would have more than $398,000 today.
As of 2026, approximately 1.32 million BTC remain to be mined out of the fixed 21 million BTC supply. That means over 93 % of all Bitcoin has already been mined, and the remainder will enter circulation gradually until about the year 2140, as mining rewards keep halving every four years.
As of 2025, an estimated 2.3 to 4 million BTC, or about 11 to 18 percent of Bitcoin's 21 million cap, are believed to be permanently lost. A 2024 River Financial report put the figure at 3.8 million, much of it tied to long-dormant addresses that have not moved coins in over a decade.
According to reports, Hafina Eddy-Evans, Howells's partner at the time, took the rubbish with the hard drive to the tip (landfill).
Alongside his wife Romaine and their three daughters, he left behind stability in the Netherlands and moved first into a campsite. Since then, the family has traveled through more than 40 countries, living off their crypto assets and promoting a lifestyle based on decentralization.
James Howells, the man who accidentally threw away a hard drive with thousands of Bitcoin (originally around 7,500 to 8,000 BTC) in 2013, has spent over a decade trying to get it back from a landfill in Wales, but has largely given up after numerous failed attempts and rejections from local authorities, with a judge ruling his quest unlikely to succeed, though he's explored tokenizing the assets and even buying the landfill site.
Key Takeaways. The IRS treats cryptocurrency as property, meaning that when you buy, sell or exchange it, this counts as a taxable event and typically results in either a capital gain or loss. When you earn income from cryptocurrency activities, this is taxed as ordinary income.
Remember the guy who made the first real-world bitcoin transaction in 2010? He paid 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas. The coins were worth about $40 then, and more than $1.24 billion when Bitcoin's price went over $124,000 for the first time in August 2025.
On May 22, 2010, known now as "Bitcoin Pizza Day." Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer from Florida, made history by using Bitcoin to purchase two pizzas from Papa John's. Hanyecz paid 10,000 Bitcoins for the pizzas, an amount that was worth about $41 at the time. Today, that is the equivalent of $1,012,030,000!
Musk has stated that he does not own any bitcoin, and Tesla stopped accepting it as payment in 2021. This discussion of bitcoin is interesting because it highlights prevailing concerns about energy consumption and a top electric vehicle maker's opinion on the matter.