On January 9, 2025, a court in Cardiff, Wales, dismissed a claim by James Howells, a crypto miner from Newport who lost a hard drive containing 8,000 BTC (worth around $750 million) at a city landfill in 2013. The judge ruled that the claim had no realistic prospect of success.​

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• Howells claimed that he had accidentally dumped the hard drive containing the bitcoins at a landfill and had been trying to get permission to retrieve it ever since.​
• In 2023, he sued Newport City Council for £495 million, claiming that denial of access to the landfill breached his rights.​
• The judge dismissed the claim, saying that it had no realistic prospect of success and that the council had the legal right to deny access to the landfill.

Howells expressed disappointment with the court's decision, but said he plans to launch his own cryptocurrency based on his unavailable Bitcoin wealth.

The case highlights the importance of storing cryptocurrencies securely and the difficulty of recovering them if access is lost.