In 2013, there was a British computer engineer named James Howells living in Newport, Wales. Before that, in the early days of Bitcoin around 2009–2010, James was using his personal computer to mine Bitcoin, and at that time the rewards were very easy, and he was solving simple mathematical problems to earn new coins.

The surprise? James collected about 7,500 Bitcoins during that time, all stored on a single hard drive containing the private keys to his digital wallet.

🗑️ The mistake that changed his life

In 2013, James decided to clean his house, and he had two similar hard drives. By mistake, one of them — which had all his wallet keys — was thrown out with the trash!

This disk was the only one that unlocked the wallet, and there was no backup.

The result? All the bitcoin on it became irretrievable, and it went into a massive landfill in Newport under hundreds of thousands of tons of garbage.

💸 The outrageous value that was lost

🔹 In 2013, the value of bitcoin was around $100–120 each, meaning the value of 7,500 bitcoins was approximately $750,000–900,000 at the time of disposal.

🔹 After the years, with the rise of bitcoin, the current value of these currencies if calculated now could be around 800 million to 950 million dollars approximately!

It means one small mistake in throwing a hard drive, losing billions of potential. 😱

🧠 Attempts to recover the disk

After discovering the mistake, James tried to convince the city council to dig in the landfill to search for the disk, and even offered to pay part of the bitcoin if it was found.

But the council refused for legal and environmental reasons, and filed lawsuits and numerous attempts for a full 12 years, without any success.

He even thought once about buying the landfill himself to be able to search, but the process was nearly impossible.

💡 The harsh lessons from the story

1️⃣ Lesson One: Always make backup copies of your digital wallet keys — losing them could mean losing millions.

2️⃣ Lesson Two: The digital world needs strong security and multiple wallets, not just storage on a single disk.

3️⃣ Lesson Three: A simple mistake can change your entire life if it involves very valuable assets like bitcoin.