Girl tells how she threw away £500 million in her boyfriend's bitcoins (5 photos)

James Howell asked his girlfriend to throw away a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins. Now he wants to dig up the local dump.





A woman has told how she accidentally threw away the "key" to her boyfriend's £569million bitcoin fortune as he fights to search a huge Welsh dump in an attempt to find it. The incident happened back in 2009.



British woman Halfina Eddy-Evans has admitted that she was the one who threw away the hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins belonging to her now ex-boyfriend James Howells. According to her, she took the hard drive to a dump in Wales, but claims that she did so at his request.





Howells claims he mined Bitcoin himself in 2009 and then forgot about it. But after discovering 8,000 coins are now worth around £569m, he is fighting for the right to explore the dump, which is run by Newport City Council.

Halfina said: "I hope he finds it. Not that I want a penny of his money, but it will shut him up!"

She says the priceless hard drive ended up in the bin, but James asked her to do it.

"Yes, I did throw out his trash, he asked me to. A computer part was thrown in a black bag with other unwanted things, and he begged me to take it, saying, 'There's a bag of trash that needs to be taken to the dump.' I had no idea what was in it, but I reluctantly left it at the local dump on my way home from school. I thought it was his problem, but I did it to help. It's not my fault he lost his money, but I hope he finds it," the woman said.



James Howells has vowed to sue Newport City Council in Wales in his latest attempt to find the "key" to a Bitcoin jackpot.

That digital key is on a laptop hard drive that he believes is currently buried somewhere among the 110,000 tonnes of rubbish at a nearby landfill site, now covered in grass.

The lost fortune, at today's prices, is worth £569 million in his Bitcoin, and he has vowed to donate ten percent of the proceeds back to the local area - enough to turn Newport into "the Dubai or Las Vegas of the UK".



He claims that Halfina, who was then his girlfriend, threw out his belongings, including computer equipment containing an important password.

In 2009, James experimented with Bitcoin for 10 weeks and mined 8,000 cryptocurrencies.

He didn't realize their value at the time, and had to stop mining after complaints from his then-partner Halfina. He kept his laptop in their bedroom, and when it was running, the noise from its fan kept her awake.

Shortly after, James spilled a glass of lemonade on his laptop, and despite trying to clean it, it never worked properly.

He sold the components for parts, keeping the hard drive and transferring all the photos and music from it to an Apple computer. The only thing he couldn't copy was a tiny file containing the password to his bitcoins, because it wasn't compatible with Apple's operating system.

He threw the hard drive in the trash and forgot about it for the next three years, focusing on work and family life - by which time he and Huckfina had two young sons.

But when the price of bitcoin rose, he realized he'd thrown away a fortune. But by 2024, the Newport landfill had been reclaimed and grass is now growing there. After James Howells admitted throwing away £569million, Newport City Council in Wales was forced to post guards at the site to deter treasure hunters.

The site contains more than 1.4m tonnes of waste, but James Howells says he won't have to search the entire site as he has narrowed down the location of the hard drive to an area of ​​100,000 tonnes. However, Newport City Council has repeatedly refused him permission to carry out research on the site because "it is not possible under our environmental permit and work of this nature would have a huge negative impact on the environment".