The crazy twist of the "unlucky saint" who lost 900 million USD in bitcoin

(Dan Tri) - After 12 years of searching for treasure in the dump, James Howells gave up. But instead of giving up, he turned the tables: turning tragedy into digital currency, forcing the world to acknowledge the loss of 8,000 bitcoins.

Rewind to 2013, to an ordinary office in Newport, South Wales. James Howells, a hard-working IT engineer, is clearing out his desk. Amidst the pile of old cables and components, he picks up two hard drives.

One was empty, the other contained something he hadn’t thought much about at the time: the private key to a wallet containing 8,000 bitcoins. He’d mined them in the early days of the cryptocurrency era, when each was worth less than a dollar. In a moment of carelessness that would later be worth nearly a billion dollars, he’d mistakenly tossed the hard drive containing the treasure into a trash bag.

And so the hard drive began its lonely journey to the Newport landfill, buried beneath tons of other trash. As for James Howells, he had no idea that he had just made one of the most expensive "transactions" in human history.

The story might have ended there if bitcoin hadn’t begun its meteoric rise. From a few cents, it shot up to tens, then hundreds, then thousands, and now it’s worth more than $114,000 a coin. Howells’ 8,000 bitcoins, once a digital toy, have suddenly turned into a fortune worth more than $900 million.

And so the greatest, and most tragic, treasure hunt of the 21st century officially begins.

12 years of digging in vain

Over the past decade, James Howells’ story has become the stuff of crypto legend. He didn’t just sit around and cry, he took action. He made it his life’s mission to reclaim his hard drive.

The list of his endeavors is enough to fill an adventure novel:

The offer was enticing: He offered the Newport city council a quarter of the value of the Bitcoins if they let him mine them. The figure was in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The blueprint: He assembled a team of experts, from excavation engineers to environmental experts to data analysts, to devise a high-tech excavation plan that included both robot dogs and artificial intelligence scanners to minimize environmental impact.

Buying the Dump: When the split offer didn't work, he upped the ante: offering to buy the entire dump for $33 million in cash.

Legal battle: He took the city council to court, fighting tooth and nail to gain access to his property.

But Howells’s almost frenzied enthusiasm was met with silence and a cold shake of the head from the Newport authorities. They repeatedly rejected every proposal, citing concerns about “serious ecological risks” and unmanageable costs. In March this year, the UK Court of Appeal threw a final cold shower, ruling that his excavation plans had “no real prospect of success”.

Howells' patience seemed to have run out. In a sarcastic comment, he said: "They've had 10 years to negotiate with me on favorable terms. What am I supposed to do now? Raise an army and march to the King?"

It seemed like all doors were closing. News sites started to spread the message: "James Howells has officially quit." But they were wrong. He didn't quit, he just changed the battlefield.

In a moment of carelessness, James Howells, a British IT engineer, mistakenly threw a hard drive containing 8,000 BTC (equivalent to more than 900 million USD today) into a trash bag (Photo: Cryptonews).

The amazing twist: "If I can't mine it, I'll tokenize it!"

“No, I haven’t given up,” Howells clarified. He had simply given up on the futile dialogue with the city council and his plan to buy the landfill. Now, he would shift the physical fight to a digital one.

This is where the story shifts from a personal tragedy to an unprecedented financial experiment. Howells’ new plan hinges on a bold legal argument: “The city council may own the land and the physical hard drive, but they do not own the data inside. Those 8,000 bitcoins are my legal, legal possession.”

And he will enforce that ownership not with excavators but with blockchain technology.

His new project is called Ceiniog Coin (symbol: INI). It is a cryptocurrency built on bitcoin’s own layer-2 network. The plan is to tokenize all 8,000 lost BTC into 800 billion Ceiniog Coins. Each token will be pegged to a satoshi (the smallest unit of bitcoin), directly reflecting the value of the buried treasure.

In simple terms, Howells is claiming: “Since I can’t touch those bitcoins, I’m going to create a new asset class that represents my legal ownership of them. The hard drive in the landfill will become the “ultimate safe” that no one can open but can see and trade ownership of what’s inside.”

This is a direct blow to the traditional legal and bureaucratic system. Howells defiantly declared: "To the gatekeepers of power who have blocked me for over 10 years: You can block the gates, you can fill the courts, but you can't stop blockchain. Crypto has won."

Ceiniog Coin: Genius move or expensive memecoin?

From the perspective of a financial and cryptocurrency expert, James Howells' plan can be seen as both bold and risky - a move that is half genius, half gamble.

Howells is attempting the seemingly impossible: turning 8,000 lost bitcoins—which are completely untraceable—into a tradable form of value through the Ceiniog Coin token. If successful, it would be a breakthrough in “digitizing ownership” of locked or disputed assets, setting a whole new precedent in digital finance.

The special thing is that the value of this coin comes not only from the huge number of BTC behind it, but also from the dramatic story of Howells - an IT engineer who lost his entire fortune just because he accidentally threw away his hard drive. In the crypto world , where emotions and beliefs can determine the value of assets, a compelling story is sometimes stronger than the technology platform.

Additionally, the fact that the project is built on court-recognized ownership also gives it a more solid legal shell than most current memecoins, which often lack collateral or legal basis.

James Howells, a British man who lost a hard drive containing 8,000 BTC, said he is no longer pursuing the excavation of the Newport landfill but insists he has not given up on the lost bitcoins (Photo: Herald.wales).

However, not everyone is convinced that Ceiniog Coin will succeed. Circuit CEO Harry Donnelly believes that it should be viewed as a memecoin rather than a serious investment. He points out that the value of the token is the product of many extremely low probabilities: from the recovery of the hard drive, to the possibility of being recognized as legitimate ownership, to the actual value of the BTC. “This token is not trading on its intrinsic value, it is trading on its story,” Donnelly concludes.

And that may be the key point: Ceiniog Coin could become the ultimate icon of the memecoin world — a digital asset whose value is shaped by hype, belief, and the myth of a $900 million treasure buried deep in a landfill.

When stories are worth more than money

Whether or not the Ceiniog Coin plan succeeds, one thing is certain: James Howells' story has become a business in itself. In April, he signed a deal with a Los Angeles production company to turn his life into a documentary series called "The Buried Bitcoin."

Even if the hard drive remains underground forever, its story continues to be "exploited" on media platforms, bringing real value to the main character.

Ultimately, James Howells’s journey has become more than a tale of lost wealth. It has become a classic lesson in the risks of self-custody of digital assets, a continuing confrontation between individuals and governments, and now, a pioneering test of the boundaries between physical and digital ownership in the blockchain era.

The world will have to wait and see whether James Howells will go down in history as a genius who turned tragedy into opportunity, or simply the crypto world’s unluckiest man who found the most creative way to tell his pain. Either way, he’s made sure his story will never be buried.

Source: https://dantri.com.vn/kinh-doanh/cu-twist-dien-ro-cua-thanh-nho-danh-mat-900-trieu-usd-bitcoin-20250806231105817.htm