James Howells, a British IT engineer who spent 12 years searching for a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins in a landfill, has denied rumors that he has given up the search. Instead, he has changed his strategy and plans to tokenize his ownership of the lost cryptocurrency, The Block reports.
In 2013, Howells accidentally threw away a hard drive containing bitcoins he had mined a few years earlier. The device ended up in a landfill in Newport. At the current price of bitcoin (~$114,000), the lost coins are worth about $915 million.
For years, Howells unsuccessfully tried to get permission from the local council to excavate the landfill. He even suggested using artificial intelligence to find the disk, but all his requests were rejected.
Howells made a formal offer to the government for $33 million to $40 million to acquire and excavate the Newport landfill. To raise funds, he planned to launch an Ordinals-based token representing 21% of the value of the lost wallet.
"The council has not responded to my offer," Howells told the media. "If they don't sell the landfill, there is no need to sell tokens to buy it. I am no longer pursuing a purchase, excavation or dialogue with the council."
Howells emphasized that he is not giving up the bitcoins, as he remains their legal owner according to a court decision in January of this year.
"The Council may own the hard drive, but they do not own the digital contents of that hard drive - the 8,000 bitcoin are legally mine in law," he explained.
Howells now plans to tokenize his ownership in the form of a new token, Ceiniog Coin (INI), on Bitcoin’s second tier. Tokenizing ownership means creating digital tokens that represent a stake in an asset — in this case, rights to 8,000 bitcoins. Token holders effectively receive a share in the potential value of the lost coins without having to physically recover them.
The project will take advantage of an upcoming network update that will remove the 80-byte limit for the OP_RETURN opcode in transactions, opening up the possibility of adding new features.
The token is scheduled to launch after October, with an ICO later this year. According to Howells, the project’s goal is to create a fast, scalable web3 payments environment, secured by the Bitcoin blockchain and backed by 8,000 BTC.
This case demonstrates how the development of blockchain technologies allows for non-standard solutions to be found even for seemingly hopeless situations with lost crypto assets.