Man who lost £690m of Bitcoin responds to claims he's 'given up' search

A man from Wales who lost nearly £700m worth of Bitcoin has issued an update on his search for the hard drive containing the cryptocurrency.

In an ideal world, we'd all have followed the advice of that one bloke on YouTube who urged us all to invest in Bitcoin, but the reality is that most of simply weren't tech savvy enough to consider just how big crypto currencies would become.

Although we've thankfully seen the back of the dodgy monkey-based NFTs that the likes of John Terry tried to sell us, while other celebrities have had a bit of a PR disaster by trying to launch their own currencies, Bitcoin is stronger than ever, and recently reached an all-time high.

At the current market rate, just one Bitcoin is worth around £86,000, which is a potentially life-changing amount, so just imagine how you'd be feeling if you were smart enough to invest in 8,000 of them.

You wouldn't be far off Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos on the rich list with that insane amount, which translates to around £690m, but unfortunately for James Howells, that ridiculous total remains out of his reach.

Even owning just one Bitcoin would be enough to make you pretty rich (Getty Stock)

He had stored the Bitcoin on a hard drive before it was accidentally thrown away by his partner, who is perhaps unsurprisingly now an ex-partner, after she took it to a council-owned tip, where it has laid waiting ever since.

James has repeatedly asked Newport City Council if he can dig his hard drive out of the landfill site it was dumped in but they have repeatedly said no, which led him to sue them for £495 million last year.

The council stressed that it would cause immense environmental damage and have now seemingly been ignoring his multi-million offers to carry out an excavation on the site, but it seems as if he isn't going to give up just yet.

Speaking to LADbible, he said: "Newport City Council is refusing to engage, respond, or negotiate (yet again) - despite the public interest, the legal basis, and the financial logic of a multi-million pound proposal. For the record: This appears to be a breach of both statutory duties and the Council’s own constitution. So here’s where we stand:If they won’t sell, there’s no need for a token sale to buy the landfill. So, I no longer seek permission from Newport City Council for anything."

James is no longer seeking to dig up the landfill site (Wales News Service)

James recently spoke at a Bitcoin event in Las Vegas, where he announced plans to launch an Ordinals-based token on October 1st. That token would have represented 21 per cent of the wallet’s value and would have been used to raise funds for the acquisition, operation, and excavation of the Newport landfill site, but he's now pivoting after a frustrating battle with the local council.

He added: "The Council may own the hard drive, but they do not own the digital contents of that hard drive - the 8,000 Bitcoin are legally mine in law - the balance of which can be verified by anyone worldwide at any time. So it is now my intention to tokenise the full value of the wallet (8,000 BTC) into a new Bitcoin L2 web3-focused smart token called Ceiniog Coin (INI), which will launch sometime after October 2025."

While that hard drive may remain lost in the landfill site forever, it seems as if James is confident that he's going to earn that generational wealth through other methods, and after such a frustrating situation, you can only wish him good luck.