From Trash to Token: The Man Who Lost 8,000 BTC Is Back (Onchain)! TL;DR: After 12 years of trying to dig up a hard drive with 8,000 BTC, James Howells is scrapping the landfill mission and launching a DeFi token inspired by the loss. It won’t bring the coins back, but it might bring the memes and liquidity. 🪦 8,000 BTC Buried, But Not Forgotten James Howells mined 8,000 BTC back in 2009. In 2013, he accidentally threw the hard drive in the trash. In 2025, that stash is worth around $905 million, and still sitting under a Newport landfill!👀 After years of rejected excavation permits, lawsuits, drone scans, and a £25 million offer to buy the entire dump, the UK courts gave a firm "nope." So… Howells is done digging. 📉 From “Let’s Buy the Landfill” to “Let’s Build a Layer-2” At Bitcoin 2025 in Vegas, he teased a dig-funded token based on Ordinals. That’s now been ditched. Instead, he’s building a Bitcoin L2 and launching a DeFi token that symbolically “represents” the lost BTC. 🧠 The Premise: ▪️The 8,000 BTC will never move. ▪️The landfill is “the ultimate vault”. ▪️The token is a narrative-backed asset, not a claim on the coins. ▪️Sounds like a memecoin with lore, not a fund with receipts. Critics, of course, are side-eyeing it: 🗨️ “It’ll trade on narrative, not real value.” — Harry Donnelly, CEO of Circuit. 🎬 Meanwhile… Hollywood Wants In His story is now being turned into a docuseries and podcast titled The Buried Bitcoin. Produced by Lebul Studios (LA), it’s set to spotlight one of crypto’s wildest “what ifs.” Howells couldn’t recover the lost BTC, but he might still spin it into a decentralized redemption arc. Buried coins. Public keys. And a new L2? Only in crypto. 📥 That’s Today’s Scoop! Save it. Share it. Tell your friend who’s “definitely got a wallet on an old laptop somewhere.” 💻🤞