The Lost Bitcoin Fortunes Nobody Can Open (and What Would Have Helped)

Somewhere in a landfill in Newport, Wales, there may be a hard drive holding the keys to 8,000 bitcoin. In a vault in Switzerland, there's a small encrypted USB drive that will wipe itself if its owner gets the password wrong twice more. And in Canada, tens of thousands of people spent years untangling what happened to their money after the founder of a crypto exchange died.

These stories get retold because the numbers are so big. But underneath the headlines, they're about something very ordinary: important information that lived in one place, or in one person's head, with no plan for what happens if that place or person is gone.

Here is what happened in each case, where things stand today, and the simple habits that might have changed the ending.

The hard drive in the landfill

In 2013, Welsh computer engineer James Howells says a hard drive containing the keys to 8,000 bitcoin was accidentally thrown out with household rubbish by his then partner. It ended up at the Docksway landfill site run by Newport City Council.

For more than a decade he asked the council for permission to dig, offering at various points to share part of any recovery with the local community. The council refused. In 2024 he sued, seeking either access or roughly £495 million in compensation. In January 2025, a High Court judge struck the claim out, saying there were no reasonable grounds for it and no realistic prospect of success at a full trial. In March 2025, the Court of Appeal refused him permission to appeal. Howells said he would take his case to the European Court of Human Rights; we could not find any public ruling on that.

By August 2025, Howells told the BBC he had given up on retrieving the drive. The council said he owed it just under £117,000 in legal costs. He announced plans for a new token tied to the lost coins instead.

The bitcoin itself has never moved. It sits on the public blockchain, visible to anyone, and spendable by no one. At around $80,000 per bitcoin in late October 2026, 8,000 coins would be worth roughly $640 million.

Two guesses left

Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, was paid 7,002 bitcoin in 2011 for making an animated explainer video called "What is Bitcoin?" At the time they were worth a few dollars each.

He kept the keys on an IronKey, an encrypted USB drive that allows ten password attempts before it permanently scrambles its contents. He wrote the password on a piece of paper. Then he lost the paper. When The New York Times reported his story in January 2021, he had already used eight of his ten guesses, and the coins were worth about $220 million.

In 2023, a recovery firm called Unciphered told WIRED it had found a way to crack this kind of IronKey and offered to help. Thomas declined, saying he was already working with other experts. As of 2026, no recovery has been publicly confirmed. At late October 2026 prices, 7,002 bitcoin would be worth around $560 million.

The exchange that collapsed

QuadrigaCX, a Canadian crypto exchange, announced in January 2019 that its founder, Gerald Cotten, had died in India the previous month. Within weeks it had stopped operating and sought creditor protection, owing more than 76,000 customers about C$215 million.

The early story was that Cotten had taken the only keys to the exchange's crypto with him. The Ontario Securities Commission's 2020 investigation told a different story. It found the collapse was mainly the result of fraud: Cotten had created fake accounts, traded customers' assets, covered the losses with other customers' deposits, and run the platform with no real oversight. Customers lost at least C$169 million. The regulator called it "an old-fashioned fraud wrapped in modern technology."

So Quadriga is not really a lost password story. But it does share one thread with the others: one person held all the control, and nobody else could check.

A happier ending, for contrast

Not every story ends badly. In 2024, WIRED reported on a European crypto owner called "Michael" who had lost the password to a wallet holding 43.6 bitcoin. He had generated the password in 2013 with a password manager but, worried about hackers, saved it only inside an encrypted file that later became corrupted.

Hardware hacker Joe Grand and a colleague discovered that the old version of the password manager created passwords in a predictable way based on the computer's clock. After months of work, they recreated the exact password, generated on May 15, 2013. Michael got his coins back, minus their fee.

He was lucky. A flaw in old software happened to work in his favor. Most people can't count on that.

What would have helped

None of these stories needs a complicated fix. Looking back, a few plain habits would have made a real difference.

Keep more than one copy, in more than one place. Howells' keys lived on one drive. Thomas' password lived on one piece of paper. A second copy, kept somewhere separate and secure, would have turned both of these from tragedies into minor inconveniences.

Make sure someone knows the thing exists. Many lost fortunes aren't stolen or destroyed. They are simply never found, because nobody knew to look. Families can't recover what they don't know about.

Write down where things are, not only what they are. A note that says "the wallet backup is in the fireproof box in the hall closet" is often more useful than the account list itself.

Avoid a single point of control. Quadriga showed what happens when one person can do everything and nobody else can see inside. In a family, the same principle applies on a smaller scale: if only you know how anything works, everything stops when you can't explain it.

Know what kind of crypto you hold. Coins on an exchange are usually handled through that company's process for deceased account holders. Coins in a wallet you control can only be reached with the keys or recovery phrase. Those are very different situations for your heirs.

Get proper advice for the big stuff. Inheritance rules vary a lot by state and by country. Putting a seed phrase directly in a will can be risky, since wills can become public during probate. An estate planning attorney can help you choose an approach that fits your situation. Nothing in this post is legal, tax or financial advice.

Where SaveMySecrets fits (and where it doesn't yet)

We're building SaveMySecrets around the idea in this post: the information that matters should reach the people who matter, at the right time, and not before. You store messages, account details and instructions in a vault that's encrypted on your own device, and you name the people who should receive it. If you stop responding to regular check-ins, and after a final check, those people go through a verification process before anything opens.

We're in alpha, and we mean it. Please don't store seed phrases, passwords to large accounts, or anything else mission critical with us yet, and keep your usual backups. If you'd like to try it with something low-stakes, such as a note telling your family which accounts exist and where to find the paperwork, it's free during the alpha at savemysecrets.com. Your feedback will shape what we build next.

Whatever tool you use, or none at all, the lesson from these stories is the same. Write it down, keep a spare, and tell someone where to look.

Sources

1. BBC News, "Is this the end of the Newport tip Bitcoin saga?" (Aug 7, 2025): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c620jej4kd4o
2. Howells v Newport City Council [2025] EWHC 22 (Ch), judgment of Jan 9, 2025: https://knyvet.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2025/22.html
3. Local Government Lawyer, Court of Appeal refusal of permission (Mar 13, 2025) and ECHR plans: https://www.localgovernmentlawyer.co.uk/litigation-and-enforcement/400-litigation-news/60345-man-behind-legal-challenge-over-bitcoin-wallet-and-access-to-council-owned-landfill-site-says-fight-far-from-over-after-court-of-appeal-rebuff
4. Cointelegraph, "Bitcoin landfill man loses appeal" (Mar 17, 2025): https://cointelegraph.com/news/uk-man-who-lost-bitcoin-landfill-loses-uk-appeal-case
5. City AM, appeal rejected, Supreme Court permission also refused (Mar 14, 2025): https://www.cityam.com/in-the-dumps-man-with-769m-of-bitcoin-in-landfill-has-appeal-rejected/
6. The New York Times, "Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes" (Jan 12, 2021): https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/technology/bitcoin-passwords-wallets-fortunes.html
7. BBC News, "Man has two guesses to unlock bitcoin worth $240m" (Jan 2021): https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55645408
8. WIRED, "They Cracked the Code to a Locked USB Drive Worth $235 Million in Bitcoin. Then It Got Weird" (Oct 2023): https://www.wired.com/story/unciphered-ironkey-password-cracking-bitcoin/
9. Bitcoin.com News, Stefan Thomas status in 2026 (no confirmed recovery): https://news.bitcoin.com/he-still-has-two-password-guesses-left-before-840-million-deletes-itself-forever-49201/
10. Ontario Securities Commission, "QuadrigaCX: A Review by Staff of the Ontario Securities Commission" (June 2020): https://www.osc.ca/quadrigacxreport/
11. OSC news release (June 11, 2020): https://www.osc.ca/en/news-events/news/osc-publishes-investigative-report-quadrigacx
12. WIRED, "How Researchers Cracked an 11-Year-Old Password to a $3 Million Crypto Wallet" (May 28, 2024): https://www.wired.com/story/roboform-password-3-million-dollar-crypto-wallet/
13. CoinGecko bitcoin price, about $80,150 on Oct 29, 2026 (used for the late October 2026 valuations): https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin

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