UK landfill site containing $768M Bitcoin hard drive to close: Report
2025-02-10
Category: None

A landfill site in the UK at the center of a man’s fight to recover a lost hard drive with 8,000 Bitcoin on it is reportedly set to close. 
The site, in Newport, Wales — east of the country’s capital, Cardiff — is expected to close in the 2025-26 financial year, BBC News reported on Feb. 9.
“The landfill has been in exploitation since the early 2000s and is coming to the end of its life, therefore the council is working on a planned closure and capping of the site over the next two years,” a Newport council spokesperson told the BBC.
The council has secured planning permission for a solar farm on part of the land, which was approved in August.
The site could contain a large Bitcoin BTCUSD stash stored on a hard drive that local IT worker James Howells claimed ended up at the tip after his former partner mistakenly binned it in 2013.
He claimed the drive contained some 8,000 BTC he mined in 2009, which would currently be worth around $768 million.
Howells has been embroiled in a decade-long legal battle with the Newport council, which he sued to either get permission to dig around the landfill to try and retrieve the drive — and offer it a share of its contents if he found it — or be compensated for his loss.
He lost the fight in January when a judge tossed the case, stating that he had “no realistic prospect” of succeeding at a full trial.
He claimed to have AI experts with technology to make an easy job of finding the hard drive, which would be at no cost to the council or the public. 
However, in October, the council said excavation was not possible under its environmental permit due to the “huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area.”
The 8,000 BTC apparently on the lost drive is a small part of a digital black hole that is the huge stash of lost BTC, which could be as much as 13% of the supply or around 3 million coins, according to Web3 executive Al Leong. 
According to Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, quantum computing will be able to hack Bitcoin in “lost wallets” and return it to circulation, which some analysts warn would put sell pressure on Bitcoin.