Man says his binned Bitcoin fortune now worth £500m

James Howells says he is suing Newport City Council

A man who accidentally binned a hard drive containing Bitcoin says it is now worth more than £500m following recent price surges.

James Howells, 39, has been trying to retrieve the hard drive containing his lost Bitcoin fortune, which he believes is in a Newport landfill site, for over a decade.

The hard drive reportedly contains 8,000 Bitcoins – worth around £4m at the time it was binned, but now worth more than £569m since the recent Bitcoin surge.

Mr Howells acquired the Bitcoins, also known as BTC, during the early days of the cryptocurrency.

His private key - a digital key used to access the coins - was stored on his computer's hard drive, which he eventually removed when upgrading his PC and placed in a drawer in his desk.

The drive remained in the drawer until 2013 when Mr Howells' partner accidentally threw it away.

He has repeatedly petitioned Newport council to grant him access to Docksway Landfill to search for the missing hard drive.

But the council has refused to allow this, previously saying the excavation was "not possible" under its licencing permit and "excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area".

Mr Howells previously offered the council 25% of the value of the coins to be used on local community projects, but said he had now reduced his offer to 10%.

Last month, he announced that he was suing Newport City Council for £495,314,800 in damages.

“They [the council] are currently, in my opinion, withholding my property without my consent and they’re not allowing me to search for it,” he said.

“The last time we put an offer to them to meet, it was worth £500m, a few weeks ago, and they refused that."

Mr Howells believes his hard drive ended up at this landfill in Newport after it was thrown out

The price of Bitcoin recently reached a record high, rising to over $80,000 (£62,000) per unit following Donald Trump’s victory in the US election.

Mr Howells speculated that, by next year, the Bitcoin on his hard drive could be worth £1bn.

The landfill itself holds over 1.4 m tonnes of waste, but Mr Howells said he had narrowed the hard drive’s location to an area consisting of 100,000 tonnes.

“There is an object in Newport worth almost $750m (£593m) and Newport council don’t want to look for it,” said Mr Howells.

“I am still willing to avert court action and have a sensible and amicable conversation with Newport City Council, but there has to be no messing around. They have to come and speak to me.”

A Newport City Council spokesperson said: “Mr. Howells has brought a civil claim against the council for a sum in the region of £0.5bn.

"The claim has no merit, and the council is vigorously resisting it.”