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From Riches to Rags: The Bitcoin Blunders of the Century

BBG News

The crypto community is in a tizzy today as Bitcoin (BTC) has soared to an unprecedented high of over $118,000. The air is thick with the scent of profit, as individuals and firms watch their wealth balloon, some to the tune of millions of dollars.

Yet, not all are basking in the glow of this digital gold rush. Some, through a series of comically unfortunate events, have found themselves on the wrong side of the ledger. A forgotten password, a misplaced hard drive, and a reformatted laptop have transformed potential fortunes into tales of woe and regret. 🙁

James Howells

James Howells, an IT engineer from Newport, Wales, is now more renowned for his misfortune than his technical prowess. An early adopter of cryptocurrencies, Howells mined Bitcoin back in 2009 when it was as valuable as a used teabag. He then proceeded to forget about it, as one does with teabags.

In 2013, Howells made a blunder that would haunt him for years to come. During an office cleanup, he inadvertently tossed a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoins into the bin. His then-girlfriend, Halfina Eddy-Evans, unaware of its significance, took the hard drive to the Docksway landfill, where it now rests under a mountain of waste. 🗑️

“The computer part had been disposed of in a black sack along with other unwanted belongings, and he begged me to take it away, saying, ‘There’s a bag of rubbish here to be taken to the tip.’ I had no idea what was in it, but I reluctantly dropped it off at the local tip on the way home from going on the school run. I thought he should be running his errands, not me, but I did it to help out. Losing it was not my fault,” she said.

Realizing his mistake, Howells embarked on a quixotic quest to recover his lost Bitcoin, now worth over $945 million. He pleaded with the Newport City Council to allow him to excavate the landfill, but his requests were met with the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug. Despite offering to donate 10% of the recovered funds to the local community, his appeals fell on deaf ears.

In late 2024, Howells took his case to the courts, seeking £495 million ($578 million) in compensation or the right to access the landfill. The court, however, dismissed his lawsuit, much to his chagrin. 🤦‍♂️

Undeterred, Howells proposed buying the landfill site after the council announced plans to close it in the 2025-26 financial year. In May, he launched a fundraising campaign to raise $75 million by tokenizing 21% of his 8,000 BTC.

“Backed by 21% of the wallet’s value (1,675 BTC), Howells’ newly announced Landfill Treasure Tokens (LTT) will launch as cultural digital collectibles on October 1, 2025 at TOKEN2049 in Singapore. These limited-edition Tokens are designed not as investments, but as symbolic digital artifacts tokenized to fuel the $75 million dollar campaign to purchase, operate, and excavate the Newport Docksway Landfill site once and for all,” the announcement reads.

His story has captured the imagination of the media, and LEBUL, a production company based in Los Angeles, has secured the rights to tell Howells’ tale. They are developing a docuseries, podcast, and short-form content. The series is titled ‘The Buried Bitcoin: The Real-Life Treasure Hunt of James Howells.’

Stefan Thomas

Stefan Thomas, former CTO of Ripple and co-creator of the Interledger Foundation, faces a different kind of lockout. In 2011, Thomas was paid 7,002 Bitcoins for creating an explanatory video about Bitcoin, a sum now valued at over $827 million. He stored the coins on a hard drive named IronKey, a device so secure it allows only 10 password attempts before permanently encrypting its contents.

Unfortunately, Thomas misplaced the piece of paper where he had written the password. By 2021, he had already used eight of his attempts, leaving him just two chances to guess correctly or lose access forever. 🤔

“I would just lay in bed and think about it. Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again. I got to a point where I said to myself, let it be in the past, just for your own mental health,” Thomas told The New York Times.

Thomas’ plight gained global attention, with offers of help pouring in. In October 2023, Wired reported that crypto recovery firm Unciphered claimed they could crack Thomas’s IronKey using an undisclosed technique. However, Thomas declined their offer, sticking with an earlier agreement he had made with two other teams to recover the Bitcoins.

Gabriel Abed

Gabriel Abed, a Barbadian diplomat, founder of Abed Group, and co-founder of Bitt, is a known cryptocurrency pioneer. Notably, he established the Caribbean’s first blockchain company in 2010. However, fate had other plans for him. In 2011, a colleague reformatted a laptop containing the private keys to a wallet, resulting in a loss of approximately 800 Bitcoins.

The loss was relatively minor at the time, but today, following Bitcoin’s record highs, those coins are worth over $94 million. Nevertheless, Abed’s lost Bitcoin did not deter his enthusiasm for cryptocurrency.

“The risk of being my own bank comes with the reward of being able to freely access my money and be a citizen of the world — that is worth it,” Abed mentioned to The New York Times.

He has since become a leading figure in the industry. In 2013, Abed co-founded Bitt in Barbados. The firm has been instrumental in pioneering Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) initiatives in the Caribbean.

Thus, the stories of James Howells, Stefan Thomas, and Gabriel Abed highlight the unpredictable nature of cryptocurrency ownership. Howells’s ongoing battle and Abed’s resilience in moving forward reflect the diverse ways individuals navigate losses. Each lost fortune carries a lesson for the growing number of crypto investors venturing through this high-stakes digital frontier. 🚀

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2025-07-11 14:57

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