It's very sad , that he has been trying to retrieve the hard drive that his girlfriend mistakenly threw away in the Newport Wales scrap heap. The hard drive had 8000 BTC stored . In January of 2025 the court formally rejected his legal proposal to dig the landfill. besides the chances of finding the hard drive is so low and even if they find the drive corrosion and contraction make data retrieval unattainable. An agonizing reminder that without a reliable reserve or cold-storage, that large sum of BTC can be lost.
No, the 8000 BTC are not stored on the hard drive. It is as
the January 2025 Judgment says:
"a hard drive containing the private key to his Bitcoin was deposited in error at Docksway Landfill Site, Newport""the Bitcoin “exist independently on the Blockchain, away from the hard drive"
"The position is no different in principle from what it would be if the record of the private key had been written on a piece of paper that had been put into the landfill. If the claimant had a separate record of the private key, he could use the private key to access the Bitcoin"January 2025 Judgment >
https://www.11kbw.com/content/uploads/Howells-v-Newport.pdf