Judge ends one man’s 11-year quest to recover $765 million in Bitcoin by digging up a landfill
A British judge has ruled against a man who wanted to dig up a landfill where he said a hard drive capable of accessing thousands of bitcoins was mistakenly dumped more than 11 years ago.
Since 2013, James Howells had hoped to recover a laptop hard drive that he said contained the private key to the cryptocurrency he said he mined in 2009. Ars wrote about it at the time. that point, noted that the value of one bitcoin just passed $1,000, making 7,500 bitcoins worth $7.5 million.
The alleged bitcoin amount has changed slightly, with Howells now saying he lost 8,000 bitcoins. Bitcoin price exceed 100,000 USD last month and was $95,636 last Friday, or $765 million for 8,000 bitcoins.
Supreme Court Justice Keyser KC delivered the ruling rule last week, sided with the defendant in Howells v. Newport City Council. The judge ruled that Howells had no realistic chance of success at trial. Howells requested “an order requiring the defendant to hand over the hard drive or allow his team of experts to excavate the landfill to find it and (alternatively) compensation equivalent to the value of the Bitcoins he did not accessible anymore. ”
The landfill authority owns the trash
The council said landfill excavation would release toxic substances into the environment, endangering people with “potentially serious risks, causing public health problems and concerns about environment,” the ruling said.
The judge found no “reasonable basis for bringing this case”, saying the case “has no realistic prospect of success if it goes to trial and there is no other compelling reason why it should handled in court”. He granted summary judgment for the defendant, dismissing the claim.
The judgment cited the Pollution Control Act 1974, which states that “anything delivered to an authority by another person during the use of the premises shall belong to the authority and may be handled accordingly.” The judgment said Howells “submitted that section 14(6)(c) only says that anything so delivered shall belong to the authority but does not say that it shall cease to belong to the owner its old”. The judge disagreed, writing that “the words ‘to the authority’ are unqualified and unrestricted.”
The judge did not find any basis to determine that the defendant’s retention of the hard drive was “unconscionable” under the law. “In my view, there would be no realistic prospect of the defendant’s retention of the Hard Drive being unconscionable. The defendant did not retain it for profit or because he wanted it. It was retained because it was buried in a landfill,” the ruling said.
Statute of limitations
The ruling was also barred by the six-year statute of limitations because Howells “knew the facts relevant to his claim before November 2013 but did not commence proceedings until May 2024,” the ruling said. know.
The judge did not need to rule on whether the hard drive actually had access to the bitcoins, saying “the only relevant issue in this case concerns ownership of and access to Hard drive”. Howells sought access to the landfill in Newport, Wales, starting in November 2013, but local officials refused. He said the hard drive is two and a half inches in size and has a wallet.dat file containing a private key that could allow access to bitcoins.
The city council said excavation would breach the terms of its license with NRW (Natural Resources Wales), pose a health and safety risk to staff, risk causing damage caused by ground movement during or after excavation work and prevent the council from “littering”.[ing] its statutory waste disposal function while the site is excavated.”
