By ALI WATKINS NYTimes News Service
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What James Howells wants to do is, by his account, simple: buy a landfill, excavate tens of thousands of tons of trash, cart every piece by dump truck to a scanner with AI-trained detection technology, install a backup magnetic belt to pick up any lingering metallic objects and, thus, find the long-lost hard drive that contains his mistakenly discarded bitcoin key, worth somewhere around $800 million.

“This seems logical,” Howells said of his plan.

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For more than a decade, Howells has begged, negotiated and pleaded with anyone — most often, the Newport City Council, in South Wales — to get access to the mountains of waste in pursuit of his crypto White Whale: a hard drive that was accidentally thrown away in 2013.

He has secured a data recovery firm and an excavator. He has enlisted the former landfill director to map out the site. He has taken the case to court, to no avail. The city has so far refused to let him excavate the landfill, and is planning to close the site for good.

Now, in what may be the final stage of his Pequodian journey, Howells has one final ask of the Newport City Council: If it won’t let him dig up the place, let him buy it.

“Seems like a better plan for me and the city,” said Howells, who envisions clearing out the trash and converting the site to a park, or perhaps making it a dump site again. “The landfill gets cleaned. I get to dig for my hard drive.”

In Howells’ plight is both the universal and the sensational. Who among us hasn’t accidentally tossed something of value? How many have tried, however fruitlessly, to get it back?

The potential value of Howells’ error raises a trickier question, too: Who owns our trash once it’s gone, especially when it’s worth more than half a billion dollars?

The circumstances that led Howells to this juncture are well documented. A computer science analyst, he was cleaning out his office sometime in 2013 when he carelessly left a hard drive among a pile of rubbish earmarked for the dump. A miscommunication with his partner at the time led to the drive being gathered up and taken to the landfill.

What Howells didn’t realize then was that the hard drive — a backup from an old gaming computer — contained the only copy of his 51-character private key, used to access bitcoin wallets. Howells had mined cryptocurrency as a hobbyist in the late 2000s, back when it was mostly useless.

It was months later when Howells realized the stakes of the error: His once-modest bitcoin wallet was worth millions. He has been trying to get the drive back ever since, hoping that, even after 12 years, some of the device’s contents might be salvageable.

Standing in his way is the Newport City Council, which says the elusive hard drive belongs to the city anyway, even if it were to be recovered. (It hasn’t been, and according to the city, any attempt to do so would come at a prohibitively high cost.) A judge has backed the council. Howells insists the drive is still legally his, arguing that it was technically discarded without his permission by a third party. He even offered to split the bitcoin fortune with the city, but was rejected.

Howells’ desperate, yearslong search isn’t a surprise to experts in the cryptocurrency world, where fortunes are fleeting and one small, poorly-timed decision can separate winners from losers.

Critics and the Newport City Council have called Howells’ pursuit a fool’s errand, a journey of towering stakes with no guarantee that a 12-year-old, buried device is even findable, let alone readable. But Howells says the numbers alone make searching the proverbial haystack worthwhile.

”This needle is very, very, very valuable — $800 million,” Howells said of the hard drive. “Which means I’m willing to search every piece of hay in order to find the needle.”

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