22 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
ANNALSOFMONEY
COIN TOSS
A Welshman has lost the key for half a billion dollars’ worth of bitcoin.
BY D. T. MAX
ILLUSTRATION BY CARL BURTON
I
f things had gone just a bit differ-
ently, James Howells might today
be as rich as the Queen of England.
The decisive moment, he now thinks,
occurred one evening in August, 2013,
when he was twenty-eight and at home
with his family in Newport, a small
city on the Welsh coast. Howells and
his partner, Hafina, were raising three
children, and family trips—like the
one that they had taken to Disneyland
Paris—were fun but exhausting. So
he had made plans to treat himself
to what he called a “lads’ vacation”: a
trip with friends to a resort in Cyprus.
Howells, an engineer who helped main-
tain emergency-response systems for
various communities in Wales, often
worked from home, and that night he
decided to neaten up his office. As he
recently recalled to me, “The thought
process was: I’m going to be drinking
every day. I don’t want to be on a hang-
over and cleaning this mess up when
I get back.”
At around 10:30 P.M., Hafina peeked
into Howells’s office. “She wanted to
have a fag with me,” he remembers.
“The office area, with the window open,
was the smoking zone.” She chatted
with Howells as he chose which items
to discard. “I’m chucking this out, put-
ting this back in—bunch of cables,
bunch of paperwork, broken mouse.”
In a cluttered desk drawer, he found
two small hard drives. One, he knew,
was blank. The other held files from
an old Dell gaming laptop, including
e-mails, music that he’d downloaded,
and duplicates of family photographs.
He’d removed the drive a few years
earlier, after he’d spilled lemonade on
the computer’s keyboard. Howells
grabbed the unwanted hard drive and
threw it into a black garbage bag.
Later, when the couple slid into bed,
Howells asked Hafina, who dropped
off their kids at day care each morn-
ing, if she would mind taking the trash
to the dump also. He remembers her
declining, saying, “It’s not my fucking
job—it’s your job.” Howells conceded
the point. As his head hit the pillow,
he recalls, he made a mental note to
remove the hard drive from the bag.
“I’m a systems engineer,” he said. “I’ve
never thrown a hard drive in the bin.
It’s just a bad idea.”
The next day, Hafina got up early
and took the garbage to the landfill
after all. Howells remembers waking
upon her return, at around nine. “Ah,
did you take the bag to the tip?” he
asked. He told himself, “Oh, fuck—
she’s chucked it,” but he was still groggy,
and he soon fell back asleep.
I
n Cyprus, Howells didn’t have as
much fun as he had expected. His
mates noticed that he wasn’t drinking
his share, and upon returning to Wales,
he told me, he was “in a shit mood,
and couldn’t figure out why.”
A couple of months later, Howells
realized what was bothering him. He
came across a BBC news story about
a twenty-nine-year-old Norwegian man
who had just used profits he’d made as
a bitcoin holder to put a down payment
on a four-hundred-thousand-dollar
apartment in Oslo. When plans for
bitcoin were first introduced, in 2008,
it was one of a number of new cryp-
tocurrencies being touted as substi-
tutes for government-issued money.
Initially, most people had treated bit-
coin as a curiosity, but it had since risen
significantly in value, and was now
starting to find acceptance as some-
thing you could actually use for buy-
ing and selling things.
Howells had known about bitcoin
Officials have repeatedly resisted James Howells’s pleas to excavate the local dump. from the start. Almost five years ear-
