The Almost Bitcoin Millionaires: Tales of Fortunes Lost to Time

The crypto community is celebrating today as Bitcoin (BTC) surged to a new all-time high of over $118,000. Many individuals and firms are watching their profits soar, with some even seeing millions of dollars in gains.

However, not everyone has shared in this fortune. While some missed the boat by failing to invest at the right time, others had Bitcoin in their possession but still lost out on vast riches due to simple oversights. A forgotten password, a misplaced hard drive, and a reformatted laptop have turned what should have been life-changing wealth into multimillion-dollar disasters.

James Howells

James Howells, an IT engineer from Newport, Wales, is now more famously known as the man who lost 8,000 Bitcoins. Howells was an early adopter of cryptocurrencies, mining Bitcoin back in 2009 when its value was almost nothing, only to forget about it later.

In 2013, Howells made a mistake that would haunt him for over a decade. He inadvertently discarded a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoins during an office cleanup. 

His then-girlfriend, Halfina Eddy-Evans, unaware of its significance, took the hard drive to the Docksway landfill, where it remains buried under more than 1.4 million tonnes of waste. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Eddy-Evans stressed that she only disposed of the hard drive because Howells asked her to.

“The computer part had been disposed of in a black sack along with other unwanted belongings, and he begged me to take it away, saying, ‘There’s a bag of rubbish here to be taken to the tip.’ I had no idea what was in it, but I reluctantly dropped it off at the local tip on the way home from going on the school run. I thought he should be running his errands, not me, but I did it to help out. Losing it was not my fault,” she said.

After recognizing what he had lost, Howells made numerous efforts to recover his Bitcoin fortune, worth over $945 million at current market prices. 

He made multiple appeals to Newport City Council, requesting permission to excavate the landfill, but these 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 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 dismissed 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 BTC.

“Backed by 21% of the wallet’s value (1,675 BTC), Howells’ newly announced Landfill Treasure Tokens (LTT) 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 tokenized to fuel the $75 million dollar campaign to purchase, operate, and excavate the Newport Docksway Landfill site once and for all,” the announcement reads.

His story remains a saga of persistence against bureaucratic and ecological hurdles. In fact, LEBUL, a production company based in Los Angeles, has secured the rights to tell Howells’ story. They are developing a docuseries, podcast, and short-form content. The series is titled ‘The Buried Bitcoin: The Real-Life Treasure Hunt of James Howells.’ 

Stefan Thomas

Stefan Thomas, former CTO of Ripple and co-creator of the Interledger Foundation, faces a different kind of lockout. In 2011, Thomas was paid 7,002 Bitcoins for creating an explanatory video about Bitcoin, a sum now valued at over $827 million. 

He stored the coins on a hard drive named IronKey. This highly secure device allows only 10 password attempts before permanently encrypting its contents.

Unfortunately, Thomas lost the piece of paper where he had written the password. By 2021, he had already used eight of his attempts, leaving him just two chances to guess correctly or lose access forever.

“I would just lay in bed and think about it. Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again. I got to a point where I said to myself, let it be in the past, just for your own mental health,” Thomas told The New York Times.

Thomas’ plight gained global attention with offers of help pouring in. In October 2023, Wired reported that crypto recovery firm Unciphered claimed they could crack Thomas’s IronKey using an undisclosed technique. However, Thomas declined their offer, sticking with an earlier agreement he had made with two other teams to recover the Bitcoins.

Gabriel Abed

Gabriel Abed, a Barbadian diplomat, founder of Abed Group, and co-founder of Bitt, is a known cryptocurrency pioneer. Notably, he established the Caribbean’s first blockchain company in 2010.

However, as fate would have it, Abed suffered a significant loss in 2011. A colleague reformatted a laptop containing the private keys to a wallet, resulting in a loss of approximately 800 Bitcoins. 

The loss was relatively minor at the time, but today, following Bitcoin’s record highs, those coins are worth over $94 million. Nevertheless, Abed’s lost Bitcoin did not deter his enthusiasm for cryptocurrency. 

“The risk of being my own bank comes with the reward of being able to freely access my money and be a citizen of the world — that is worth it,” Abed mentioned to The New York Times.

He has since become a leading figure in the industry. In 2013, Abed co-founded Bitt in Barbados. The firm has been instrumental in pioneering Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) initiatives in the Caribbean.

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

Each lost fortune carries a lesson for the growing number of crypto investors venturing through this high-stakes digital frontier.