hind hard drives and came to believe
that the city officials were wrong. Al-
though the covering of the drive was
metal, the disk inside was glass. “It’s
actually coated in a cobalt layer that is
anti-corrosive,” Howells told me. He
conceded that the hard drive would
have been subjected to some compact-
ing when it was layered in with soil
and other trash. But, however rough
the process, it might not have frac-
tured the disk and destroyed the drive’s
contents. Howells told me he’d learned
that, in 2003, when the Columbia space
shuttle plunged to Earth, one of its
hard drives was “burned to a crisp,”
but its data could still be retrieved.
“They managed to recover ninety-nine
per cent of the data,” he said. At one
point, Howells reached out to the com-
pany that NASA had contracted with:
Ontrack, a data-recovery firm based
in Minneapolis. According to How-
ells, the company estimated that, if the
disk hadn’t cracked, there was an
eighty-to-ninety-per-cent chance that
the data he needed could be salvaged.
Howells’s bitcoin folder, which con-
tained only his private key and the his-
tory of his transactions on the net-
work, took up a tiny amount of disk
space—“just thirty-two kilobytes!” he
told me. He was certain that, as long
as that part of the disk was undam-
aged, he could recover his fortune.
As Howells tried to ready a plan to
present to officials in Newport, the
value of the cryptocurrency kept ris-
ing. More and more garbage piled on
top of the hard drive, and the private
key for his bitcoin sank deeper and
deeper. In 2017, the city rejected his re-
quest to attempt an exhumation, cit-
ing an adviser’s statement: “There ap-
pears to be no practical way that the
drive could be recovered.”
By the beginning of 2018, Howells
had more than a hundred million dol-
lars buried in the Newport dump. He
kept pleading his case to city officials.
He called his local member of the
Welsh Parliament, in Cardiff, and of
the British Parliament, in London. He
thought of suing Newport, but such
moves, commonplace in America, are
rare in the United Kingdom. “I’m not
a court person,” Howells told me.
As a systems engineer, he knew how
to organize a project, and through the
years he assembled an increasingly so-
phisticated strategy for finding the
hard drive. He met with potential in-
vestors, and eventually made arrange-
ments with two European business-
men who agreed to support a recovery
operation. Howells would get only
about a third of the proceeds. He had
hoped for a much higher sum; the
money was his, after all. He recalls
being told, “James, that’s not how it
works.” He also consulted with com-
panies that could perform targeted
landfill removals. He became increas-
ingly convinced that this was a realistic
path. (“They probably move more dirt
in one season of ‘Gold Rush: Alaska’
than would be required for this oper-
ation,” he told me.) This past January,
he obtained a letter from Ontrack tes-
tifying that the drive was likely recov-
erable, and, after the Newport dump
manager who’d explained to him the
architecture of the landfill retired, How-
ells enlisted him as an expert.
Earlier this year, as the value of each
bitcoin passed thirty-five thousand
dollars, and Howells’s holdings ex-
ceeded two hundred and eighty mil-
lion dollars, he made a public offer to
give Newport a twenty-five-per-cent
cut of the proceeds, which could beearmarked for a COVID-19 relief fund.
The city did not accept his offer. “The
attitude of the council does not com-
pute, it just does not make sense,” How-
ells complained to the Guardian. Across
the Internet, commenters generally
did not take a sympathetic view of
Howells’s situation. “Your loss fool,” a
poster on the Web site WalesOnline
declared. “This is the ultimate defini-
tion of a ‘Loser,’” another wrote, add-
ing, “Wondering how this guy even
survived into adulthood.”
For Howells, it was a particularly
cruel twist that he could not get a se-
rious meeting with Newport officials
despite having become arguably the
city’s most famous resident. He had
thought that he was striking a blow
for the little guy by mining bitcoin;
now it was clear that, in Newport at
least, little guys still had no power. “It’s
my own local team who are screwing
me over!” he told me. “It’s not bank-
ers, it’s not somebody from a far dis-
tance—it’s the people I’ve grown up
with and lived with.”
This past May, Howells finally was
granted a Zoom meeting with two city
officials, one of whom was responsible
for Newport’s waste and sanitation
services. She listened politely to his“I brought a book just in case chatting with you
turns out not to be the right option for me.”