British bloke loses court case to retrieve laptop (containing 8,000 Bitcoins) from Newport landfill

Perhaps you know Newport from the 2011 Jay-Z parody song which proved that the British can also rap, but there is also a garbage dump there which since 2013 contains a PC hard drive with some 690 million euros in Bitcoins on it.

James Howell, the original owner of the hard drive, has been trying for years to obtain the right to excavate the hard drive from the public dump, but the city council refuses and does not believe his story. James started a court case before one of the highest legal bodies in Great Britain. The judge of the British High Court has now prohibited him from retrieving the laptop hard drive.

Empire State of Mind

In 2009, the third single from Jay-Z’s popular The Blueprint album was a duet with Alicia Keys called Empire State of Mind. It became a worldwide hit with the words New York being repeated several times during the chorus.

Two years later, a British duo from Wales made a parody of the song and video, with the little-known city of Newport as the subject.

Jay-Z himself thought it was very funny and spread the video via social media.

Bitcoin

Another two years later, in 2013, something else happened in Newport. James Howell, who mined Bitcoins very early on (according to research from the New Yorker, he was one of the first five people to do so), got into a fight with his ex-girlfriend. She then threw his laptop away. A little later he realized that there were still about 8,000 Bitcoins on that laptop. The story first appeared in the British press in 2013, when those Bitcoins had a value of around 5 million euros.

His ex-girlfriend has also corroborated the story over the past 12 years, but the city council of Newport continues to refuse to allow James to dig for that laptop with a team, because they fear environmental damage (and think those Bitcoins are lost forever).

Value of those Bitcoins in 2025… about 690 million euros. I understand James’ frustration.