The man who threw 8,000 Bitcoins in the trash (and now Hollywood is making a series about it)

I’m ending the week with the story you’ve probably already heard about secondhand, but I assure you you don’t know all the details. And the ending hasn’t been written yet.

James Howells lived in Newport, Wales. It was 2013. He had an old hard drive tucked away in a drawer with 8,000 Bitcoins he had mined years earlier, back when mining with your laptop at home was still a normal thing people did for fun. At the time, those Bitcoins were worth barely a few hundred dollars. Just a nerdy curiosity—nothing more.

One day, while cleaning, he mistook that hard drive for a damaged one that was no longer working. He threw it away. Without thinking twice.

A few days later, he realized the mistake. He went straight to the Newport municipal landfill to look for it. But it was already too late: the drive had vanished among tons of trash from all over the city, in a landfill the size of several football fields.

Up to that point, it would just have been another sad anecdote. What’s strange is what came after: more than a decade of legal and media battles against the Newport council, asking for permission to excavate that specific area of the landfill. James even hired specialized data-recovery firms and submitted detailed excavation plans with machinery and environmental protocols. The council has denied him again and again, citing environmental reasons and costs.

Meanwhile, the value of those 8,000 Bitcoins has gone from a few hundred dollars to, depending on the day’s price, hundreds of millions of dollars. All that money is possibly still buried under layers of trash from a Welsh town.

And here comes the twist nobody saw coming: recently it was announced that NBCUniversal will produce a series about this whole story. What began as a domestic cleaning mistake ended up becoming television content, with James as the protagonist of his own crypto tragedy.

What stands out most to me about this story, after all these years of following it, is that it still has no ending. We don’t know if they’ll ever allow him to excavate it, nor whether the drive really survived intact after all this time among trash and chemicals. It’s a fortune that exists and doesn’t exist at the same time, depending on a municipal permit that never comes.

Do you think the council should let him excavate it, or do you think it’s already a lost cause after all these years?

With this, we close our first week of Our bizarre Crypto universe. If you liked these three stories, follow me so you don’t miss what’s coming next — the crypto ecosystem has many more of these waiting to be told.