THIS MAN THREW AWAY 8,000 BITCOIN.
In 2013, Welsh IT engineer James Howells mistakenly threw away a hard drive containing the private keys to 8,000 $BTC he had mined years earlier.
By the time he realized what had happened, the hard drive was already buried in the Docksway landfill in Newport, Wales.
For the next 12 years, he tried everything to get it back.
He offered the local council millions of pounds, proposed sharing the recovered Bitcoin with the city, hired excavation experts, and even offered to buy the entire landfill.
The council rejected every proposal, citing environmental risks and arguing that anything dumped in the landfill legally belonged to them.
In 2025, Howells lost his latest court case and has since largely given up.
Today, those 8,000 Bitcoin would be worth $500 million.
And they remain buried somewhere beneath the landfill.
One hard drive. One mistake. One of the most expensive losses in Bitcoin history.
