A bitcoin-branded clock ticks on the wall of James Howells’s Newport home — a daily reminder, if it were needed, of the day he inadvertently binned £154 million of it. One evening nine years ago, he claims to have put a hard drive in a black bin bag during a clear-out of his home office, realising as he went to sleep that he’d chucked the device, and not an identical faulty one. He awoke to find his 8,000 bitcoins had been tossed into landfill.
As well anyone who had just lost a fortune might, Howells attempted to reclaim it, contacting Newport city council like “Oliver Twist . . . begging them to dig their landfill to try and recover my coins”. They said no in
