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Twelve years after accidentally throwing away a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoin (BTC), James Howells said he is abandoning his long-running effort to excavate it from a Welsh landfill. Still, he insisted that he hadn’t given up on his lost BTC fortune.
Howell is now shifting his focus from physical recovery to tokenizing his legal ownership of the 8,000 BTC.
The BTC Hard Drive That Launched A 12-Year Long Hunt
Buried deep in a Newport landfill, beneath layers of years-old garbage, there is a hard drive that holds the keys to 8,000 Bitcoins — or so James Howells believes, after his then-girlfriend accidentally threw the drive away in 2013.
As Bitcoin’s value rocketed parabolically over the years, Howells sought permission to excavate the landfill, only to have his request denied by the regional council. Howells mulled over other options, like using AI to help locate the hard drive. At today’s BTC price of around $114,160, Howell’s Bitcoin cache is worth around $914 million.
 
The Welshman even made a sizable offer to buy and excavate the landfill site, which was ignored by Newport representatives.
And now, after years of battling the local authority in court to retrieve the hard drive, Howells has come up with a new plan: to turn the story of the lost Bitcoin into a DeFi token.
Tokenizing Legal Ownership
James Howells said he is launching a DeFi-focused layer-2 network built on Bitcoin called Ceiniog.
The token will not be backed by spendable Bitcoin, but by the idea of the lost coins, making the lost hard drive a symbolic vault. “We won’t need to access the 8,000 Bitcoin wallet because the new token is a representation of it — that’s the whole point,” he opined. “The landfill becomes a vault no one can open, but everyone can see.”
The token is scheduled for launch after October, and an initial coin offering this year, which will debut at a discounted price from his buried Bitcoin. He expects Ceiniog’s market capitalization to naturally grow to the value of his 8,000 BTC over time.
Source: https://zycrypto.com/man-who-accidentally-lost-8000-btc-in-landfill-says-he-isnt-ditching-treasure-hunt-heres-his-new-plan/