James Howells has been fighting with Newport City Council in Wales for a long time to get his $632 million in Bitcoin that he lost when he accidentally tossed away a hard drive. In 2013, a former business associate inadvertently discarded the hard drive that contained eight thousand Bitcoins.
The council has forbidden Howells from searching the landfill site, where he believes the hard drive is buried, in his pursuit of retrieving the drive. Howells, unfazed, has spent years formulating a strategy to find the hard drive and has decided to sue the council for $648 million.
The council has claimed that there are too many environmental risks to conduct an excavation; however, Howells’ team maintains that the hard drive may be recovered by precisely excavating a small part of the dump. Howells has gone so far as to recruit artificial intelligence experts and NASA data recovery specialists to assist him in his quest.
Howells is hell-bent on getting his money back, so the lawsuit has dragged on for more than a decade. For the rest of my life, I could sit at my desk and think about it, as he put it. It would be more productive for me to attempt to retrieve this bit of metal. Who knows what the verdict will be, but one thing is sure: Howells’ resolve to get his stolen Bitcoin back won’t be swayed.
