Bitcoin Miner Sues Local Council To Exhume 8,000 BTC Buried In Landfill

An early Bitcoin miner from Wales is suing his local council for $646.4 million after the council rebuffed efforts to excavate a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoin from a landfill site.

On Oct. 12, the Welsh news publication WalesOnline reported it had seen court documents indicating that James Howells, a former system engineer and early Bitcoin miner, is pursuing legal action against his local Newport City Council for nearly half a billion British pounds.

Howells told the publication that the lawsuit is a “last resort” intended to pressure the council into agreeing to allow a landfill site to be excavated. Howells said a team of experts agreed to carry out a $13 million excavation free of cost, adding that he is offering the council 10% of the Bitcoins’ value if retrieved. The case is due to be heard in December.

“I'm suing the council for £495m because they won't give me back my bin bag,” Howells said.

The sum requested equates to the value of the lost BTC as of Bitcoin's all-time high earlier this year.

Lost coins

Howells said the council has persistently “ignored” requests to excavate the assets after accidentally throwing out a hard drive containing the private keys to his BTC stash in 2013, including being rejected after offering 25% of his BTC stash to the council in 2021.

Howells claimed to have been one of just five nodes securing the network when he began mining in 2009. After mining Bitcoin for a few months using a gaming laptop, he ceased running a node after his constantly whirring computer fans became a source of irritation for his partner.

That same year, Howell’s laptop broke after becoming the victim of spilled lemonade, prompting him to extract the hard drive and stash it in a desk drawer. In August 2013, Howell accidentally discarded the hard drive, mistaking it for another drive he intended to throw out.

‘Full-time operation’

Howells has since spent most of the last decade devising how to retrieve the lost coins, with his story periodically making headlines as the price of BTC rose.

Howells quit his job after negotiating with a group of investors to plot excavating the landfill “full-time." Under the agreement, Howells would receive 30% of any recovered BTC, while the remaining assets would be split between Howell’s investors, the excavation team, and the Newport council.

Howells claims to know the rough location of the hard drive after recruiting the council’s former head of landfill to his recovery team, who determined the drive would be located in “Cell 2 – Area 2” of the Docksway Landfill.

The excavation would take between 18 and 36 months to complete, with the team estimating that there is an 80% chance the private keys could be recovered should they find the hard drive.

However, the council has objected to the dig over environmental concerns, despite Howell’s team claiming the excavation could be carried out in a “safe” manner. "The council has told Mr Howells multiple times that excavation is not possible under our environmental permit,” it said.

Lawyers representing the council also claim Newport City has legally owned the hard drive since it was dumped at Docksway Landfill.