For a man who has lost $40 million in the past week, James Howells seems really rather jolly. “Pah!” he says. “That’s nothing. I used to be worth half a billion. Today it’s only $130 million [£107 million], but it doesn’t bother me. If I thought about it too much I’d go crazy.”
Funny he should mention going crazy, because that’s exactly how I’d imagined him. Not just crazy, but totally barking. Mad as a box of frogs. Completely certifiable. And I’m a bit disappointed that he isn’t.
Howells, 37, is the man who famously — accidentally — threw away a computer hard drive on which was a cryptocurrency wallet containing 8,000 of the first bitcoins ever mined. When, in the summer of 2013, he