Bitcoin Forum

Do you guys remember that guy who well before btc had its first highs threw away a hard-disk with btc which became worth millions and he went to rummage the landfill looking for it and also offered a slice of btc to the city council if it helped him find it?

Is he still looking for it?  ::)    :D   :D

The cynic in me thinks the HDD could easily have been compacted, shredded and destroyed by now. Whether by normal landfill processes, or exposure to the elements.

But then I remember reading news stories about data being recovered from HDDs inside the World Trade Centers during 9/11 attacks and HDDs inside the space shuttle columbia which unfortunately exploded (R.I.P.).

If data can be recovered from an HDD located inside a building with 110 floors that was utterly destroyed. Maybe he has a chance of finding his long lost HDD inside of a landfill, after all? HDDs could be tougher and easier to recover data from than we realize.

But if we're being serious, anyone with the resources or capital to scour landfills in search of HDDs with lost crypto don't need him as a middle man. They could already be conducting operations of their own inside landfills, as we speak, without him.

It's probably becoming more and more viable as btc price rises for the council to actually try to get it - if it's possible and if they can reduce the chances of toxic gasses being released into the environment and waste contaminating the waters and then actually find the drive which will probably all remain extremely unlikely.

There's so mamy reasons the data on the hard drive may be destroyed though (especially if electrical or magnetic contamination are likely).

He probably could have made most of it back working a part time job and buying crypto all these years instead of digging in the dump.

Yes, it's around $70 million offer to city council to help him find that one hard drive that contains million worth of bitcoins but I don't think that they are interested on the offer itself.

I think the earliest offer is that he will donated that huge chunk of money to covid relief fun but no one has step up.

And it goes to say that it's obviously he lost all of it already.

https://greenlemon.me/man-offers-70-m-to-find-a-hard-drive-loaded-with-7500-bitcoin-that-he-threw-away-accidentally/

James Howells threw his hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoin in 2013. Today, that's around $140 million. But that hard drive has been buried in at least 110,000 tons of garbage. And that's almost a decade ago. At this point, I doubt he will still be successful in trying to retrieve it. I'm not even sure if there are still efforts to locate it until now. But in case the search-- if it's still going on-- will be successful, I'm sure it will hit the headlines just as the search hit the news.

the answer is I don't know. but I hope that the man can quickly find him, and may God give him patience and fortitude. but it will definitely be very difficult to find a hard drive in the trash because the hard drive is a small thing, not a big thing.
With an incident like that, hopefully it will be an example for all of us, namely to always be careful when placing objects that contain valuable assets.

@landheer I believe the guy threw the disk away on purpose not by accident, he had this old drive he didn't need and just disposed of it disregarding the "experiments" he made with btc which when he threw the disk away were just worthless bits.
Am I wrong or did he do it by accident?

This is the most recent update on it.
Howells has requested to dig for his hard drive for almost ten years, but Newport’s city council has consistently rejected him because they claim it would be costly and environmentally harmful.
He has put together a group of eight professionals, including one advisor who worked for a company that recovered data from the black box of the Columbia space shuttle, who have expertise in things like AI-powered sorting, landfill excavation, waste management, and data extraction.
The specialists and their businesses would be hired to carry out the excavation and would get a bonus if the bitcoin hoard could be found.
more details - https://alltechnews.info/james-howells-finding-181-million-in-bitcoin-buried-in-a-dump-is-a-mission/

As described earlier, James Howells bought bitcoin for next to nothing and kept his hard drive on his desk. After spilling liquid on the desk, he decided the hard drive was defective and threw it away while cleaning.


I also thought about it. Also, given that he still attempted to hire a team to search, he most likely spent a significant amount of money, to his detriment. Although, knowing you are a millionaire and that your millions are stored in a dump can have a negative psychological impact.

There are mistakes we make without the understanding of what value the actions of it may cost in future, he didn't regretted his actions then not until he realized that things have surges high with the bitcoin price and value, but then it was too late, he would have developed more strategy to buy the more by then and invested just to keep in a safety place and would have been smiling by now, same thing applicable to those not investing now, thinking it's too late they would have done that long ago, why not correct your mistakes and forget the past in other to embrace the future.

Probably he stopped already. Maybe he realize this when its too late already but if ever he find it he is probably gonna take a millions worth of money.

Im thinking he is full of regret now but what done is done. Btc is so much cheap before but thats change when the value skyrocketed. Even though he is requesting for a dig up, surely this would not be easy and risky, cause it might cause environmetal impact and ending up still loss. Though chances to find it is slim, can they really make it working with cause time might broke it as well.

Knowing the odds with this is challenging because a landfill covers so much land, and to be able to detect a metal part on it is vast. You could see multiple traces of metal on the garbage thrown there, but since it's so long ago, it will be a feat, and the uncertainty is overwhelming.

No one is probably going to help. Is he documenting anything with his progress? Maybe he is updating his social media or something.

This is just grunt work in my opinion. The guy could've made most of his lost earnings if he'd just worked and bought bitcoins again but I guess that's just me being cynical, just like what others have pointed here, hope is not lost as some of the HDDs in the most horrific of events in the history of humanity still works and was recovered. Then again, it would best work for him if he'd just let it be and moved on, the HDD could've been shredded and gone by now especially since it's been almost a decade now since he lost his bitcoins. This is a prime example of the sunk cost fallacy, he keeps on believing that there's no point in stopping now since he has put in so much effort into finding it, not realizing he's better off moving on.

I might not be sure that I know of the guy you are talking about or which country he lives in but as far as I know, in most countries once something lands in the landfill, or even the trash container, that particular something, along with the trash, lawfully belongs to the city at that point? So why would the city not just take it as their own? If they could find it? Did they ever say how much BTC that guy lost?

If I made such a mistake I would be beating myself over it for years to come  ;D

I remember him and he had made headlines several months ago and yes, he's still looking for it. Why are you asking for it? Do you have some idea on how he shall find it?

Years has passed and it's almost impossible that he'll ever find it. Even if he offer good money for it, there will be the slightest chance that he'll look at it.

He asked the city council to close that landfill just to start the search for it but they didn't agree AFAIK.

He should probably come to peace with this fact and go on otherwise he will be tormented for the rest of his life.
What are the chances he finds it? Those are ridiculous.

Nope he didn't stop and the last news from few months ago was that he  is still trying to find ways to persuade his local council to excavate the fill and try to find the lost hard drive. I do hope for his sake to finally forget about it and move on with his life.


Didn't he mine those 7500 bitcoin instead of buying it?


Since all that happened back in 2013 I don't think that he could easily buy back majority of bitcoin, at least not on his salary.

Oh yes, thanks for the correction. Russian sources talk about buying, and I honestly always thought so. But now I've found a deeper story about the lost bitcoins, and yes, you're right, Howells mined those bitcoins on his gaming laptop. (I hope this is a true story)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/half-a-billion-in-bitcoin-lost-in-the-dump

If he had found it, it would have been news. There are 3 myths that I know about Bitcoin. The first is the person who trashed this hard drive. the second one is the person who paid 1000 Btc for 1 Pizza and the other is the person who received 200 Btc for a job he did on time but lost his password. If I am not mistaken, this person had a certain right to try his password, the last 2 rights were left, if those statements were negative, a large amount would be garbage.

not myths

1. this thread

2. pizza: https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Laszlo_Hanyecz

3.   2 tries left: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55645408

I just find that guy's story simply heartbreaking, the fact he continues looking for that HDD to this day and all this situation started because his mistake.
If only he was more careful when he needed to be, he would be enjoying his early retirement in a lovely tropical island or in a luxurious apartment in a Japanese metropolis, but instead, in this timeline he finds himself swimming in garbage for years, handing over half of the possible reward to some corporation in exchange for help. Life can be cruel sometimes.

I don't know how I would feel if I was in his shoes, I would need several bottles of rum to keep going with the search.  :(

Really ? Is this a true story? I have never heard of it but really sounds interesting to me. I googled about it and found the article which mentioned about this incident but there were no updates on this incident no further articles so it looks as if he was not able to find it. But there is a big chance that it would have gone into pieces while it was sent to the trash dump area.

Landfills are just generally a bad thing, something humans must be swiftly moving away from. They are harmful to the environment themselves, but is there research on additional damage that digging into them can do, on which scale and why? It seems the city council denied the request of digging there to look for the drive, despite a commitment to donate $70 million in case of successful recovery (referring here to the story which Dave1 referred to), but I can't find information on how digging in one area of a landfill can be harmful to the environment on its own.

It looks like this is him https://twitter.com/howelzy

I remember reading about him in 2016 and at the time he was already looking for the hard drive. Imagine if he were to take a loan back then and start buying BTC for $300, or sold his car and whatever unwanted stuff he had and converted all that into bitcoin. At the time it was pretty easy to get 100 BTC which would be enough to live happily ever after and forget about that buried treasure.

I hope he finds it though. The city should strike a deal with him that he does some recycling or segregates whatever he digs through. This would be a win - win scenario.

Honestly, I do not know what happened to him, but he is certainly not the only one. Do you really imagine that all the coins mined or bought back in those days were kept in wallets and still held today? Hell I got in in late 2012 and I do not have my bitcoins, I sold them all, I have recently bought some more, and have some savings, but nothing huge at all, if I kept the ones I earned, I would have 100+ bitcoins right now easily, which is a huge ton of money in Turkey, so it should not be really a shocking result to know that there are some people like this guy who would consider it as useless for sure.

This event makes me think that time will come when people will rummage through landfills looking of HDDs to check if it has BTC inside it.  Looks like gold mining but instead of excavating mountains and lands, this kind of activity excavates mountains of trash. and further makes me think Bitcoin being mined in two different approaches, virtual mining and landfill mining.  ;D

Anyway, I also think that the HDD had already corroded and possibly crashed or shredded.  Its been a decade so I think it is somehow impossible to get that HDD back.