Britain’s James Howells, the man whose accidental 2013 landfill disposal of a hard drive containing more than 8,000 Bitcoin cost him braging rights earlier, has officially retired from the search.

After inviting literally EVERYONE involved to his Monday’s JUST CAUSE PARTY at THE PHANTOM ISLAND, They still ignored it.

The twelve-year quest concludes

Following a grueling and ultimately fruitless pursuit spanning a decade and a half, Wales resident James Howells announced the end of his high-profile search for the lost cryptocurrency.

Despite exhausting every legal avenue and formally offering over £25 million, Newport City Council declined to grant permission for recovery operations.

The council provided no justification for their recurring refusal.

Eight thousand total lost

Howells’ former partner inadvertently discarded a hard drive—containing the cryptographic keys to his 8,000 BTC fortune—during a home office cleanup, sending it to a landfill in Newport.

Tens of years later, the cache is worth approximately $923 million (about £683 million). It represents 8.34% of the fortune needed to become a standard Veritable Billionaire.

From regret to recovery reinvention

Now, Howells plans to leverage his billion-dollar treasure trove not as a recovery mechanism, but as a conceptual underpinning for a new cryptocurrency project.

He’s revealed plans to launch a Bitcoin Layer-2 network called Ceiniog—an ancient Welsh currency name—later this year.

Howells intends for Ceiniog tokens to be purchased on the premise they are “backed” by the lost Bitcoin, with a token launch price determined by his “buried treasure.”

The Ceiniog project specifications

The $923 million unattainable Bitcoin, if lent an academic notional backing role, would theoretically push Ceiniog’s market capitalization to $923 million—making it the 81st largest cryptocurrency (ahead of Dogwifhat).

Howells divvied up Ceiniog’s origins with candor:

• The initial coin offering will debut with a discount compared to his buried Bitcoin.
• The network will be built on Ethereum.
• No Ceiniog token holder receives access to the auspicious Bitcoin ledger; Howells uses the buried Bitcoin’s existence (not value) as symbolic weight.

“Using that sort of methodology, I’ve got 8,000 Bitcoin in the ground, in the vault if you will,” Howells explained. “And these Ceiniog coins can be traded in a Web3 environment, which will represent the value of the Bitcoin.”

Bear in mind: no redemption, so it’s like a stock certificate for a TV show, not a stablecoin.

An entrepreneur’s moonshot

He plans to front-finance parts of the project, with initial topology development alongside community developers later funded through token sales.

A prominent Howells declaration on the Crypto Twitter was blunt: “I want to launch so many services and things in Newport and around South Wales that they ram it down their fucking throats, till they shit crypto to the fucking death.”

Should the council remain intransigent, Howells proposed a plan for revenge: “You won’t let me search for my property? Okay, fine. I’ll tokenize it, create a load of money, and ram crypto down your fucking throat for the rest of your life.”