Woman says she binned ex-boyfriend’s £620,000,000 bitcoin fortune

The ex-girlfriend of an IT engineer who claims he lost a hard drive containing a now-vast Bitcoin fortune 15 years ago has spoken out about her role in the incident for the first time.

Halfina Eddy-Evans was living with James Howells, 39, in Newport, Wales, when he began using his computer to ‘mine’ the digital currency in its early days.

James says he amassed around 8,000 of the coins in 2009, which would have been worth around £6 if sold when the first Bitcoin trades took place that year.

Today, they’d be worth £618 million – which goes some way to explaining why James is still desperately campaigning for his local council to let him dig up a landfill site where he believes the drive ended up.

The 39-year-old previously claimed his ex mistakenly took the drive to the dump after he put it in a plastic bag which she thought was rubbish.

But Halfina has now hit back, admitting she disposed of the bag but insisting she did so at James’ request.

‘The computer part had been disposed of in a black sack along with other unwanted belongings and he begged me to take it away, saying “There’s a bag of rubbish here to be taken to the tip”,’ she told MailOnline on Monday.

‘I had no idea what was in it but I reluctantly dropped it off at the local tip on the way home from going on the school run.

‘I thought he should be running his errands, not me, but I did it to help out. Losing it was not my fault.’

Halfina, who has two sons with James, said she sincerely hopes James finds the drive because ‘it will shut him up’.

She added: ‘I’d love nothing more than him to find it. I’m sick and tired of hearing about it.’

Newport Council has repeatedly refused James’ requests to let him search Docksway Landfill for the missing item.

It said digging up the site is ‘not possible’ under its licensing permit and that ”excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area’.

Mr Howells previously pledged to donate 25% of the value of the coins to the council for use on local community projects, but has now reduced his offer to 10%.

Last month he announced he was suing the council for nearly £500 million (the value of the Bitcoins at the time) in damages for ‘withholding my property without my consent’.

Bitcoin’s price hit a record high on Friday of £78,796 per coin after rallying under expectations that Donald Trump will weaken cryptocurrency regulation.

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