Share this article
UK Man Offers Council $72M if He Finds Discarded Bitcoin Trove at Landfill
The town of Newport in Wales could get a hefty reward if the treasure is found in the trash.
Updated Sep 14, 2021, 10:56 a.m. Published Jan 14, 2021, 12:49 p.m.
A U.K. IT engineer who mistakenly threw away a hard drive with around £210 million (US$288 million) of bitcoin on it is asking the local government once again to allow him to search the local landfill for his device.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Don't miss another story.Subscribe to the Crypto Daybook Americas Newsletter today. See all newsletters
- James Howells dumped the hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoins back in 2013, and has had several requests to search the landfill denied. However, this time he is offering the local government in Newport, Wales, a reward of 25% of the bitcoin on that hard drive, which he said would go to a Covid Relief Fund for the city's residents, reports the South Wales Argus.
- "It’s quite a lot of money still sat there in the landfill," Howells told the publication, adding he would like to present an "action plan" to retrieve the physical hard drive.
- Bitcoin prices have climbed from $10,000 to $41,000 over the past three months. The price of bitcoin was at $38,417 at the time of publication, so this now makes the stash worth an estimated $288 million and the loss of his hard drive that much more painful.
- A spokeswoman for the Newport City Council told the Argus: “Even if we were able to agree to his request, there is the question of who would meet the cost [of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste] if the hard drive was not found or was damaged to such an extent that the data could not be recovered."
- Recently ex-Ripple Labs CTO Stefan Thomas shared his story with the New York Times about a digital wallet he is unable to access because he forgot his password, leaving his multimillion-dollar fortune in limbo.
Read more: UK Treasury Calls for Feedback on Approach to Cryptocurrency and Stablecoin Regulation
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
Ethereum’s P2P Layer Is Improving Just as Institutional ETH Buys Pick Up
Early PeerDAS performance is proof that the Ethereum Foundation can now ship complex networking improvements at scale.
What to know:
- Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that the network is addressing its lack of peer-to-peer networking expertise, highlighting the progress of PeerDAS.
- PeerDAS, a prototype for Data Availability Sampling, is crucial for Ethereum's scalability and decentralization through sharding.
- BitMine Immersion Technologies has significantly increased its Ethereum holdings, viewing it as a strategic investment in the network's future scaling capabilities.
Top Stories
