8,000 BTC Buried in the Landfill and Other Horror Stories of the Lost Coins

In 2013, a girlfriend of the British man accidentally threw away his hard drive, which contained approximately 8,000 Bitcoins. Years of legal struggle for the right to retrieve the disc from the landfill yielded no results. These and four other stories remind us to be careful with our crypto assets.

How not to throw away Bitcoins: The James Howells case

The story of the Welsh IT worker whose hard drive containing thousands of bitcoins ended up in landfill has been circulating in the media for years. All this time he was trying in vain to gain access to the waste dump where his treasures lay in peace, and on January 9, 2025 it seems the case came to a bleak finale.

James Howells, who lives in Newport, learned about Bitcoin around 2009 and tried mining it for a while before completely forgetting about the cryptocurrency for a few years. At one point he spilled liquid on his computer, so he took it apart and still recovered his hard drive. The disk allegedly contains a private key to Howells’ Bitcoin wallet. In 2013, his then-girlfriend Halfina Eddy-Evans accidentally threw a hard drive.

Here’s what Eddy-Evans told the Daily Mail in an exclusive interview:

“The computer part had been thrown into a black sack with other unwanted items, and he begged me to take it, saying, ‘There’s a bag of rubbish here to haul away.’

I had no idea what was in it, but I reluctantly dropped it off at a local tip on the way home from school… I figured he should be doing the errands, not me, but I did it to help… It wasn’t my fault I lost.

After some time, Howells realized that the approximately 8,000 BTC he had mined in the past were worth millions. He tried to find a valuable disk but failed. After some investigation, he concluded that the hard drive with the private key on it was somewhere in the Docksway landfill in Wales. The weight of scrap in this storage area is estimated to be over 1.4 million tons.

Accompanied by a team of experts, Howells made plans to excavate the area. Although Howells planned to cover the cost of the operation himself and donate 25% or 30% to Newport City Council and local residents, officials refused him permission, citing the environmental impact. Searching the site could result in fires and the release of toxic gases.

Howells sued Newport City Council. In his ultimatum he demanded permission to search the waste dump or compensation of £495 million. On January 9, 2025, it was reported that the Supreme Court dismissed the case because it had no realistic chance of success.

At the time, the total cost of Howells’ bitcoins was estimated at approximately $750 million. However, the likelihood of the site search being successful is questionable. What are the chances that the hard drive in question is still functional? What are the chances of it being found at Docksway landfill? Does this disk really exist? Why did Howells and Halfina split? There are many questions.

IronKey on my back: The Stephan Thomas case

The Stephan Thomas case is another well-known nightmare in the crypto community. An American programmer of German origin was paid in BTC for creating an animated educational video about Bitcoin in 2011. Thomas decided to keep a modest reward of 7,002 BTC (!) in a USB hardware wallet called IronKey (about $5.3k at the time). ).

Hardware wallets are widely accepted as the safest way to store bitcoins. The problem is that Thomas lost the coded slip and the IronKey is programmed to lock the coins forever after ten incorrect password entries. Thomas, who is a multimillionaire at least on paper, did his best to crack this damn code, and even more. He hired cryptographers. He even resorted to hypnosis. After eight out of ten attempts nothing helped. Luckily, Thomas started working at Ripple in 2012 and has since made a lot of cryptocurrencies without repeating his old mistakes.

He forgot his crypto wallet password: The Peter Schiff case

On January 19, 2020, Peter Schiff, an avid Bitcoin critic, gold maximalist, and Europac chief economist, shared a screenshot showing that he was unable to enter the correct password into X from the crypto wallet app. The caption he added said his password was no longer valid and the wallet was “somehow corrupted.”

I didn’t forget my password. Read my tweet. My wallet forgot my password.

— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) January 19, 2020

He concluded that owning Bitcoin was a bad idea. After several Bitcoin enthusiasts gave him advice or offered help. When Professional Capital Management CEO and well-known Bitcoin maxi Anthony Pompliano assumed that Schiff had simply forgotten his password, Schiff added that it was his wallet that had forgotten the password, not him.

When another tech CEO, Rahul Sood, asked Schiff to provide the initial statement, Schiff said he had never had one. A few days later, Schiff admitted that he mistook the PIN for a password, but insisted he still had no access to his funds. This is not a strange thing, considering the fact that the economist did not save his password or seed expression.

Since all the Bitcoins in my corrupt wallet were gifted to me, losing them is not such a big tragedy for me. The phrase “good luck, easy go” is especially true for: #Bitcoin. My plan was still to hold the ship and sink with it. The difference is that my ship sank before Bitcoin.

— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) January 19, 2020

Fortunately, he said, it wasn’t a tragedy for him as the bitcoins in his wallet were gifted and his plan was to HODL Bitcoin until it went bankrupt. Quick reminder: Bitcoin was trading at $8,600 when the story happened. This story tells us that no matter how high your position in the financial world is, you can lose your funds if you use crypto applications improperly.

Orange paper: the case of Mark Frauenfelder

Mark Frauenfelder, one of the original authors of the Wired publication and co-founder of BoingBoing, shared his story on Wired. He spent $3,000 to buy 7.4 BTC in January 2016. When the BTC price increased significantly, he wisely decided to move his funds to Trezor’s hardware wallet. He wrote the 24-word seed phrase on a piece of orange paper, created an easy-to-remember PIN code, and added it next to the seed phrase.

While Frauenfelder was on vacation, the cleaning service employee threw away the orange paper. When the BTC price skyrocketed in 2017, Mark decided to move his coins but it turned out he forgot his PIN code.

One of Trezor’s features is that each incorrectly entered PIN doubles the waiting time before the next attempt. Before long, Mark found himself faced with an hour-long wait. That’s when he decided to contact support. But they couldn’t do anything without a seed sentence written on the same lost piece of paper. It took Frauenfelder a four-hour hypnosis session to remember the PIN. Wrong one. The following attempts resulted in an 18-hour wallet hold.

As a professional from the IT field, Frauenfelder was already acquainted with high-profile fintech experts. One of them advised Mark to seek help from Saleem Rashid, a genius hacker. Rashid managed to hack Trezor and obtain a PIN and a seed phrase. Please note that the hacked version of the wallet is no longer supported and later versions are considered safe. Please do your best to store backup data safely.

The professor learned his lesson: the case of Alexander Halavais

Alexander Halavais, a professor of social technology at Arizona State University, purchased $70 worth of BTC in front of the graduating class as part of the training process in 2010. He didn’t think much about these coins at the time and therefore lost access to his wallet.

Seven years later, in an interview in the midst of the crypto craze in 2017, Halavais joked that he tried to ignore news about the current Bitcoin price to avoid getting upset.