The saga of Newport tip’s lost bitcoin fortune has taken another twist as the man who originally lost his hard drive with 8000 bitcoins on, has said he wants to buy the land the tip is on to try and push forward on his quest to reclaim his half a billion pounds treasure.
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00:00Bitcoin has been one of the money-making stories we've heard over the last decade or two,
00:06with people making their millions using the online currency.
00:08In 2013 they'd hit $1,000 for the first time, and now one bitcoin is worth 100 times that.
00:16One man from Newport, James Howells, got in on the bitcoin trend even earlier, as in 2009
00:21he mined 8,000 coins for basically nothing, and forgot about them sitting on a hard drive
00:26in his house.
00:27He alleges that his ex-girlfriend threw it away after a few years without thinking.
00:33Fast forward to 2025, and that fortune is now worth more than half a billion pounds
00:38and has recently lost a legal battle to search Newport's tip where the hard drive is sitting.
00:43In the latest development Mr Howells has said he's interested in buying the tip when it
00:47closes at some point in the next year or two, as the council have planning permission to
00:51build a solar farm on the land.
00:53It's fair to guess that one person in the city will be hoping those plans don't happen.