After 12 years of treasure hunting in a landfill, James Howells has finally called it quits. But instead of surrendering, he’s flipping the script—turning tragedy into crypto and forcing the world to recognize the 8,000 lost bitcoins.

The Bold Twist: “If I can’t dig it up, I’ll tokenize it!”
“No, I’ve never truly given up,” Howells clarified. He explained that he’s merely abandoned the futile negotiations with the city council and the plan to buy back the landfill. Now, he’s shifting from a physical battle to a digital offensive.
This marks the moment when the story transforms from a personal tragedy into an unprecedented financial experiment. Howells’ new strategy hinges on a daring legal argument: “The city council may own the land and the physical hard drive, but they do not own the data inside. The 8,000 bitcoins are legally mine, and the law recognizes that.”
And he intends to enforce that ownership—not with excavators, but with blockchain technology.
Enter Ceiniog Coin
His new project is called Ceiniog Coin, a cryptocurrency built on Bitcoin’s layer-2 network. The plan is to tokenize the entire 8,000 lost BTC into 800 billion Ceiniog Coins. Each token will be pegged symbolically to one satoshi (the smallest unit of Bitcoin), directly reflecting the value of the buried treasure.
Put simply, Howells is declaring: “Since I can’t physically access the bitcoins, I’ll create a new asset that represents my legal ownership of them. That hard drive in the landfill will become the ultimate vault—one that no one can open, but everyone can see and trade ownership of its contents.”
This is a direct challenge to traditional legal and bureaucratic systems. Howells defiantly states: “To those gatekeepers who’ve blocked me for over a decade: You can shut the gates, bury the courts, but you can’t block the blockchain. Crypto has won.”
Ceiniog Coin: Genius Innovation or High-Stakes Memecoin?
Howells is attempting the seemingly impossible: turning 8,000 inaccessible bitcoins into a tradable form of value through Ceiniog Coin. If successful, this could be a groundbreaking precedent in the digital ownership of locked or disputed assets—redefining the boundaries of financial innovation.
What makes this coin unique isn’t just the massive BTC backing it, but the dramatic story behind it. In the crypto world, where emotion and belief often drive asset value, a compelling narrative can be more powerful than the technology itself.
And that may be the key: Ceiniog Coin could become the ultimate symbol of the memecoin era—a digital asset whose value is shaped by hype, belief, and the legend of a $900 million treasure buried deep beneath a landfill.
When the Story Is Worth More Than the Money
Ultimately, James Howells’ journey has transcended the realm of a simple asset loss. It’s become a classic lesson in the risks of self-custody, a prolonged battle between individual and authority, and now, a pioneering experiment in the divide between physical and digital ownership in the blockchain age.
The world will have to wait and see whether James Howells goes down in history as a genius who turned disaster into opportunity—or simply the unluckiest man in crypto, who found the most creative way to tell his tale of loss. Either way, he’s ensured that his story will never be buried.