26 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
proposal to recover the bitcoin, at no
cost to the city, but was not persuaded.
As he recalls it, she informed him, “You
know, Mr. Howells, there is absolutely
zero appetite for this project to go
ahead within Newport City Council.”
When the meeting ended, she said
that she would call him if the situa-
tion changed. Months of silence fol-
lowed. (A spokesperson for the city
council told me that the official per-
mit for the site does not allow “exca-
vation work.”)
E
arlier this fall, I went to see Howells
in Newport. We had been talking
and texting for nearly a year, mostly
on the messaging app Telegram. He
had been by turns evasive and defen-
sive, often coming across as an unyield-
ing cyber libertarian. Tech shaped his
world view. At one point, I asked him
what he thought about the still novel
COVID-19 vaccines. He replied, “Some-
thing I’ve learnt from IT world...don’t
ever get the first version.” This past
January, when online brokerage com-
panies restricted trading in GameStop
stock in order to limit its price rise,
Howells wrote to me, “It shows once
and for all, in plain view of everyone
watching, that the game (life) is com-
pletely and utterly rigged against the
little guy.” While we affably fenced,
the value of a bitcoin rose to sixty-three
thousand dollars in April, then slumped
to thirty thousand dollars in July, then
rose again.
On October 21st, the day I arrived
in Newport, the value of a bitcoin had
just hit a new peak: nearly sixty-seven
thousand dollars. Howells met me by
the train station, wearing jeans and a
crisp sweatshirt from Lonsdale. He
drives a twenty-year-old BMW con-
vertible that he bought before his bit-
coin days. He is small and fit, with a
skin-fade haircut and a light-brown
half beard. The over-all effect was of
concision and capability.
Moments after we sat down in a
coffee shop, he pulled out his phone
and showed me an app that he uses to
track his holdings. Under the rubric
“Unspent Coins” was the current value
of his bitcoin: $533,963,174. The previ-
ous day, he noted, he’d made twenty
million dollars. We had Welsh pan-
cakes, and he paid with cash. He ex-
plained, “Using credit cards is kind of
enabling the opposition, if you see what
I mean.”
We next went on a tour of New-
port, and he told me about the city’s
history of finding lost objects, a topic
on which he was very well informed.
As we drove across the River Usk, he
mentioned that, in 2002, while the city
was building a new arts center along
its banks, workers had dug up a fif-
teenth-century Iberian sailing ship.
The next day, we visited the local an-
tiquities museum, where he showed
me a cooking pot, likely belonging to
a Roman soldier, that had been bur-
ied in a nearby field. From the shat-
tered remains trickled a trail of coins.
Howells compared them to his buried
hard drive, then corrected himself: the
coins were not like bitcoin at all. Some-
times, he explained, messengers and
go-betweens had clipped off a bit of
precious metal to repay themselves for
the trouble of handling transactions.
“People stole from the coins,” he said.
The percentage of silver in Roman
coins kept declining, setting off run-
away inflation. “It’s similar to what the
central banks are doing today,” he said.
The widespread use of bitcoin, he as-
sured me, would prevent a similar eco-
nomic collapse.
We went to the dump. It was a bu-
colic site between an estuary and docks
where, many years ago, ships had been
loaded with Welsh coal. Derricks stood
idle. To get to the landfill, we had to
drive past some city offices—“the
enemy,” Howells joked. Newport felt
rickety: faded signs on small busi-
nesses, empty land where factories had
once stood. As he drove, Howells
mused on why the local officials had
refused to allow him to dig up his
hoard. He theorized that the dump
had not been following environmen-
tal regulations, and that unearthing a
section of landfill could embarrass the
city and make it vulnerable to lawsuits.
“Who knows how many dirty baby
nappies are buried out there?” he asked.
“We are here to witness Jacob, who screamed at his Xbox
for four hours just this morning, become a man.”
• •
