The end for the man who threw 8,000 Bitcoins into the landfill

James Howells, who lost 8,000 bitcoins in Newport's landfill, has sued the city for the right to excavate the landfill. Photo: BBC .

Howells said he is looking for other ways to get his cryptocurrency back, specifically by tokenizing his legal ownership of the 8,000 BTC as determined by the court.

In 2013, a British IT engineer accidentally threw away a hard drive containing the Bitcoins he had mined several years earlier, causing it to fall into a landfill in the city of Newport.

As Bitcoin prices soared in the years since, Howells has repeatedly sought permission to excavate the landfill, but has been repeatedly denied by the local council. He has also tried other solutions, such as using AI to locate the hard drives. With Bitcoin currently trading at over $112,000 , Howells’s lost Bitcoins are worth an estimated $900 million .

Recently, many social media posts claimed that Howells had officially given up on his quest to recover the lost Bitcoins.

“No, I never gave up,” Howells told The Block of the rumors. “There’s some truth to the story, but not in the way it’s being exaggerated.”

Howells said he submitted a formal offer worth between $33 million and $40 million to buy and excavate the Newport landfill in July to Newport City Council leaders, his legal team, and a local congressman. To raise funds for the deal, Howells plans to launch a token on Ordinals (a platform for bitcoin-based NFTs) that represents 21% of the value of the lost Bitcoin wallet.

However, according to Howells, Newport representatives have not responded to this proposal.

“If they don’t sell, there’s no need for a token sale to buy the landfill,” Howells said. “I’m no longer pursuing the landfill, no longer pursuing excavation or remediation, no longer in dialogue with the council or their representatives.”

Howells said he had simply “changed” his strategy, not given up on his Bitcoin, as he was still the legal owner of 8,000 BTC, a claim confirmed by the UK Supreme Court in January this year.

“Newport may own the hard drive, but they don’t own the data inside. Those 8,000 Bitcoins are legally mine. Anyone in the world can verify those balances at any time,” Howells said.

Howells now plans to tokenize the legal ownership of the 8,000 missing BTC into a new token on Bitcoin's second layer, called Ceiniog Coin (INI). The Ceiniog Coin token is expected to launch after October, and Howells said there will be an ICO later this year.

“The goal is to build the Ceiniog ecosystem, a web3 environment focused on payments, high speed, highly scalable, fast confirmation, secured by the Bitcoin blockchain and backed by 8,000 Bitcoins,” Howells said.

Source: https://znews.vn/cai-ket-cho-nguoi-nem-8000-bitcoin-vao-bai-rac-post1587906.html