Bitcoin Billionaire Loses Hard Drive in Landfill

James Howells, the Welsh engineer who famously lost 8,000 Bitcoin (now worth nearly a billion dollars) in a Newport landfill in 2013, joins us at Bitcoin 2025 to share his incredible story. For over a decade, he's fought a relentless legal battle against the local council to recover his hard drive. But after multiple court losses and a rejected offer to give them 10% of the coins, he's taking a different approach.

James is now tokenizing 21% of the wallet's value into ordinals and selling them to the public to raise money to buy the landfill site outright. He's assembled a world-class team of experts, from excavation specialists to AI and drone technicians, to meticulously search the massive dump for his hard drive. This isn't just a treasure hunt—it's a high-stakes, real-world saga that's being turned into a global documentary series.

From the financial crisis that led him to Bitcoin to the "Napster for money" philosophy that drove his early mining, James reveals why he’s never given up. He explains how the data on the drive can be recovered, why Newport Council’s environmental excuses are a farce, and how the crypto community can help him pull off the biggest digital treasure hunt in history.