The crypto community is celebrating Bitcoin's (BTC) consecutive records, which reached a historical high of $118,000. However, not everything is rosy when it comes to the world's most popular cryptocurrency. Over time, many investors and companies have seen their profits slip through their fingers due to human and technical failures.
While some missed the opportunity by not investing at the right moment, others had Bitcoin in their possession but still lost great fortunes due to simple oversights. A forgotten password, a lost hard drive, and a reformatted laptop turned what should have been transformative wealth into million-dollar disasters. BeInCrypto rescues these stories for you to stay alert with the latest BTC tsunami!
What happens after throwing away 8,000 BTC in the trash?
The IT engineer from Newport, Wales, James Howells was the person who lost 8,000 Bitcoins. Howells was one of the first to adopt cryptocurrencies, mining BTC in 2009 when its value was almost negligible, only to forget it later.
In 2013, Howells made a mistake that would haunt him for more than a decade. During an office cleanup, his girlfriend inadvertently threw away the hard drive that contained the cryptocurrencies. Halfina Eddy-Evans, unaware of the HD's importance, took it to a landfill in Docksway, where it remains among over 1.4 million tons of trash. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Eddy-Evans emphasized that she only discarded the hard drive because Howells asked her to.
The computer part was discarded in a black bag along with other unwanted belongings, and he pleaded with me to take it, saying, 'There's a garbage bag here to be taken to the dump.' I had no idea what was in it, but reluctantly left it at the local dump on the way back from school. I thought he should be doing his chores, not me, but I did it to help. Losing it wasn't my fault,” he said.
After realizing what he had lost, Howells made numerous efforts to recover his Bitcoin fortune, valued at over $945 million at current market prices. In fact, he requested permission from the Newport City Council to excavate the landfill; however, the requests were denied due to environmental risks. He even offered 10% of the recovered funds to the community, but to no avail.
Howells' battle continues, now on TV.
By the end of 2024, Howells filed a lawsuit against the council, seeking £495 million ($578 million) in compensation or the right to access the landfill. However, the court rejected Howells' lawsuit. In February 2025, he even proposed buying the landfill site after the Council's closure in 2026.
Relentlessly, in May, Howells launched a fundraising campaign to raise $75 million to buy the landfill, tokenizing 21% of 8,000 BTC.
Backed by 21% of the wallet value (1,675 BTC), Howells' newly announced Landfill Treasure Tokens (LTT) will be launched as cultural digital collectibles on October 1, 2025, at TOKEN2049 in Singapore. These limited edition tokens are designed not as investments, but as tokenized symbolic digital artifacts to drive the $75 million campaign to buy, operate, and excavate the Newport Docksway Landfill site once and for all,” the announcement states.
Additionally, his story inspired the production company LEBUL to tell this story in a documentary series and a podcast titled 'The Buried Bitcoin: The Real-Life Treasure Hunt of James Howells.'
What to do when you forget the password?
The then CTO of Ripple and co-creator of the Interledger Foundation, Stefan Thomas, faces a different kind of challenge. In 2011, Thomas was paid 7,002 Bitcoins for creating an explanatory video about what cryptocurrency was. At current values, the amount corresponds to over $827 million.
He stored the coins on a hard drive called IronKey. This highly secure device allows only 10 password attempts before permanently encrypting its content. Unfortunately, Thomas lost the paper where he had written down the password. By 2021, he had already used eight of his attempts, leaving only two chances to access his million-dollar wallet.
I would just lie in bed thinking about it. Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn't work, and I would get desperate. I reached a point where I told myself to leave it in the past for my own mental health,” Thomas told The New York Times.
In October 2023, Wired reported that the crypto recovery company Unciphered claimed it could unlock Thomas' IronKey using an undisclosed technique. However, Thomas declined the offer, maintaining a previous one he had made with two other teams to recover the forgotten fortune.
Giving up is not an option in the crypto market.
A diplomat from Barbados and founder of the Abed Group, Gabriel Abed, is a pioneer in the cryptocurrency world, having established the first blockchain company in the Caribbean in 2010. However, fate has not been kind to Abed.
In 2011, a colleague formatted a laptop that contained the private keys of a wallet, resulting in a loss of approximately 800 Bitcoins. Indeed, the loss was relatively small at the time, but today, after Bitcoin's records, those coins are worth over $94 million.
Even so, Abed's lost Bitcoin has not diminished his enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies.
The risk of being my own bank comes with the reward of being able to access my money freely and being a citizen of the world; it's worth it, he stated in an interview with The New York Times.
Since then, he has become a prominent figure in the industry. In 2013, Abed co-founded Bitt, a company actively promoting Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) initiatives in the Caribbean.
Experiences like those of James Howells, Stefan Thomas, and Gabriel Abed show that crypto investors must be aware of the unpredictable nature of cryptocurrencies, whether due to the coins themselves or the storage systems. Each lost fortune brings a lesson for the growing number of crypto investors venturing into this high-risk digital frontier.
The article 'Meet the Stories of Lost Bitcoin (BTC) Fortunes' was first seen on BeInCrypto Brazil.
