This man lost 8,000 bitcoins because his girlfriend threw away a hard drive: Now they're worth over $760 million!

It’s a pretty safe bet that all of us have someone close to us who’s a neat freak that goes around picking things up that we have lying around. That’s all fine and good as long as you can find the place where they “put it away.”

However, it can be frustrating if that place is in the trash. Even more so if the trash collector has come and gone. Especially, if the thing that got “put away” is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

This man lost 8,000 bitcoins because his girlfriend threw away a hard drive: Now they’re worth over $760 million!

First off, it should be pointed out that in this case it wasn’t the person that threw away the item, Halfina Eddy-Evans, the ex-partner of the James Howells whose incredibly valuable property is missing, that was to blame. At least that is what she told the MailOnline recently.

“Losing it was not my fault!” she told the outlet. She says that he asked her to throw out some bags of trash, one of which contained the veritable treasure.

The item in question was a hard drive that contained a file with a password that would give access to 8,000 bitcoins. Howells, a software engineer, says that he mined the coins himself in 2009. Unfortunately, soon after he spilt a lemonade on his computer rendering it inoperable and the only thing he was unable to get off the hard drive was that now very precious password.

So, he threw it in a drawer, that you’ll find in most homes, with some other random knick-knacks and forgot about it. Easy enough, as back then it was a newfound craze and the coins were worth less than one one-hundredth of a cent in the beginning.

As per CoinCodex data, at the end of the following year they had significantly more value, $0.30 per coin, which would have made the coins worth $2,400. A fair amount of money, but Howells was focusing on work and his family, as the couple had a pair of young sons.

Sometime later, “maybe nine-ten years” ago according to Halfina, oblivious to the fact of the hard drive’s contents, it ended up in a sack of junk that needed to be taken out. Halfina told the MailOnline that Howells asked her to take it to the dump which she did “reluctantly” on her way home from a school run. ‘I thought he should be running his errands, not me, but I did it to help out,” she said.

Bitcoin has seen a massive surge in value this year, especially since the 2024 US presidential election. The value is pushing $100,000 per coin, with experts predicting it will cross that threshold in the coming months if not weeks. Its current value holding above $96,000, which would make those 8,000 coins worth more than $760 million today.

Howells is currently suing the city council of Newport, Wales for close to $650 million for their repeated refusal to let him dig up the landfill where he believes it is buried. He has offered to give 10% of the bitcoins’ value to the city council.

A spokesperson for Newport City Council told the MailOnline that Howells' lawsuit “has no merit” and that they are “vigorously resisting it.”

“Newport City Council has been contacted multiple times since 2013 about the possibility of retrieving a piece of IT hardware said to be in our landfill site,” said the spokesperson. “The council has told Mr. Howells multiple times that excavation is not possible under our environmental permit, and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area”

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