• James Howells lost 8,000 bitcoins worth $945 million now after accidentally disposing of a hard drive containing the private keys.

  • Stefan Thomas, unable to remember his password, risks losing 7,002 bitcoins worth $827 million after eight failed attempts.

  • Gabriel Ubaid lost 800 bitcoins in 2011 due to a colleague's reformatting of a laptop, but he remains a key figure in the digital currency industry.

James Howells

James Howells, an IT engineer from Newport, Wales, is now more widely known as the man who lost 8,000 $BTC . Howells was an early adopter of digital currencies, having mined bitcoin in 2009 when it was nearly worthless, only to forget about it later.

In 2013, Howells made a mistake that would haunt him for over a decade. He inadvertently disposed of a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins while cleaning his office.

His then-girlfriend, Halvina Ede-Evans, unaware of its significance, took the hard drive to the Docksway landfill, where it remains buried under over 1.4 million tons of waste. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Ede-Evans confirmed she disposed of the hard drive only because Howells asked her to.

(((She said in an interview with the Daily Mail: "The computer part was disposed of in a black bag with other unwanted items, pleading with me to take it away, saying, 'Here's a garbage bag to take to the landfill.' I had no idea what was inside, but I reluctantly dropped it off at the local landfill on my way home from dropping the kids off at school. I thought he should handle his tasks, not me, but I did it to help. His loss was not my fault.")))

After realizing what he had lost, Howells made numerous attempts to retrieve his bitcoin fortune, valued at over $945 million at current market prices.

He submitted multiple requests to the Newport City Council, seeking permission to excavate the landfill, but they were consistently denied due to environmental risks and logistical challenges. Despite offering to donate 10% of the recovered funds to the local community, his requests were unsuccessful.

In late 2014, Howells filed a lawsuit against the council, seeking £495 million ($578 million) in damages or the right to access the landfill. However, the court rejected Howells' lawsuit.

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

The announcement stated that "backed by 21% of the wallet value (1,675 bitcoins), Howells' new LTT treasure tokens 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 to support the $75 million campaign to buy, operate, and excavate the Newport Docks landfill once and for all."

His story remains an epic of perseverance against bureaucratic and environmental obstacles. In fact, LEBUL, a Los Angeles-based production company, acquired the rights to tell Howells' story. They are developing a documentary series, podcast, and short content. The series is titled 'Buried Bitcoin: The Search for James Howells' Real Treasure.'

Stefan Thomas

Stefan Thomas, former CTO of Ripple and co-founder of the Interledger Foundation, faces a different kind of closure. In 2011, 7,002 bitcoins were paid to Thomas to create a demo video for $BTC , an amount now valued at over $827 million.

Stored cryptocurrencies on a hard drive called IronKey. This highly secure device allows only ten password attempts before permanently encrypting its contents.

Unfortunately, Thomas lost the paper on which his password was written. By 2021, he had already made eight attempts, leaving him with only two chances to guess correctly or lose access forever.

(((Thomas told The New York Times: "I was lying in bed thinking about it. Then I would go to the computer with a new strategy, and it wouldn't work, and I'd be desperate again. I reached a point where I said to myself, let it be in the past, just for your mental health.")))

Thomas’ plight garnered global attention with a flood of offers for help. In October 2023, Wired reported that the cryptocurrency recovery company Unciphered claimed it could decode Thomas' IronKey using undisclosed techniques. However, Thomas declined their offer, sticking to a prior agreement he made with two other teams to recover the bitcoin.

Gabriel Ubaid

Gabriel Ubaid, a Barbadian diplomat, founder of the Ubaid Group, and co-founder of Bitt, is recognized as a known pioneer in the cryptocurrency space. Notably, he founded the first blockchain company in the Caribbean in 2010.

However, as fate would have it, Ubaid suffered a major loss in 2011. A colleague accidentally formatted a laptop containing the private keys to a wallet, resulting in the loss of about 800 $BTC

The loss was relatively small at the time, but today, after record bitcoin surges, the value of those coins is estimated to be over $94 million. However, the lost bitcoin did not deter Ubaid from his enthusiasm for cryptocurrency.

(((Ubaid mentioned to The New York Times that "the risks of being my own banker come with the reward of having free access to my money and being a global citizen — and it's worth it.")))

Since then, he has become a leading figure in the industry. In 2013, Ubaid co-founded Bitt in Barbados. The company was a pioneer in central bank digital currency (CBDC) initiatives in the Caribbean.

The stories of James Howells, Stefan Thomas, and Gabriel Ubaid highlight the unpredictable nature of cryptocurrency ownership. Howells' ongoing battle and Ubaid's resilience in moving forward reflect the diverse ways individuals navigate losses.

Every lost fortune holds a lesson for the growing number of cryptocurrency investors venturing into these high-risk digital frontiers.

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