The story of James Havells, a British man who accidentally lost access to a thousand bitcoins—now worth billions of dollars—has come to an unexpected conclusion. After more than ten years of searching, he decided to call it quits. dev .ua reports on this.
Back in 2009, when cryptocurrency was still just an experiment, Havells began mining Bitcoin on his home computer. He stored his private keys on one of his hard drives. But in 2013, while doing a thorough cleanup of the office, I made a fatal mistake—I accidentally threw that disc away with the trash. His girlfriend at the time, unaware of the significance of the discovery, took the bag to the city dump in Newport.
Over the next few years, Havells tried to track down the disk, whose value had been rising along with the price of Bitcoin. He repeatedly asked local authorities to organize a search at the landfill, but was turned down every time. In 2024, he even filed a lawsuit against the Newport City Council, but the court did not rule in his favor. The following year, in a desperate move, he offered the municipality 50 million pounds sterling as compensation in exchange for permission to conduct the excavations, but this offer also went unanswered.
The most recent mentions of him on social media date back to May 2025. And recently, the crypto community reported that James had finally called off the search. According to people who know him, this decision was not a spur-of-the-moment one: Havells had been hesitating for a long time, but eventually realized that further attempts were pointless. “I’m not giving up,” he said, hinting at a possible new project in the cryptocurrency space.
Experts believe that if 8,000 bitcoins remain in the landfill until 2030, their value could reach eight billion dollars. However, Havells seems to have put that behind him and is looking for new opportunities.