Wales Online reports: James Howells has spent more than a decade trying to get back a dumped hard drive. Now he has assembled a team of top lawyers to sue the council he claims has 'ignored' him "I'm suing the council for £495m because they won't give me back my bin bag."
A man has filed a court claim against Newport council in a "last resort" to get back almost half a billion pounds' worth of Bitcoin. A mix-up saw James Howells' hard drive dumped at a recycling centre in 2013 causing him to lose access to cryptocurrency coins which have since rocketed in value.
WalesOnline has seen a court document that says Mr Howells, 39, is suing the council for £495,314,800 in damages, which was the peak valuation of his 8,000 Bitcoins from earlier this year. But he told us this is not a reflection of "what is really going on" and the point is to "leverage" the council into agreeing to an excavation of its landfill to avoid a legal battle. Mr Howells says he has assembled a team of experts who would carry out the £10million dig at no cost to the council. He is also offering the council 10% of the coins' value if recovered.
...
The hard drive disaster unfolded after a miscommunication between the IT engineer and his then-partner. Mr Howells, who learned about Bitcoin in 2009 by spending time on IT forums, believes he was one of the very first miners of the cryptocurrency. In basic terms he created the 8,000 coins himself and they cost him nothing beyond pennies' worth of electricity to run his laptop. He stored the private key needed to access the coins on a 2.5in hard drive which he put in a drawer at his home office.
In August 2013 he had a clearout of equipment. Looking through his drawers he came across two hard drives of the same size. One contained the Bitcoin data while the other was blank. Mistakenly he put the Bitcoin one into a black bin liner. When he went to bed that evening he asked his then-partner if after the school run the next morning she would take that bin bag and another one to Newport household waste recycling centre. "His partner refused and stated that she did not wish to do that," write Mr Howells' team of barristers in the claim.
The claim says Mr Howells was "not overly concerned" by her refusal because he had made a mental note to double-check if he had put the right hard drive in the bin bag. But when he woke at 9am his partner had already returned from the school run and had taken the bin bags to the tip. Mr Howells' lost Bitcoins were worth less than £1m at the time but within three months they had soared to a value of £9m. One day they could be worth billions, Mr Howells believes, citing predictions from asset management firm VanEck.
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Newport council sent us a statement hitting back at the "weak" court claim and the criticism over its environmental breaches. Its spokesman said: "The council has told Mr Howells multiple times that excavation is not possible under our environmental permit and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area. The council is the only body authorised to carry out operations on the site.
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James Howells, a British IT worker, mined over 7,500 Bitcoins back in 2009, when they were worth next to nothing. Now a single Bitcoin is worth nearly $100,000, valuing his stash at well over $700 million. Unfortunately, Howells accidentally threw the hard drive he stored the key on in the trash. He has a scheme to get that money back, according to The Guardian. He wants to buy the landfill where it could be buried and dig it up.
Howells doesn’t exactly know where the hard drive is, but has a solid guess based on when he tossed it in the trash. He has it narrowed down to a particular section of a South Wales landfill that houses 15,000 metric tons of waste. The landfill is approaching maximum capacity, so Howells wants to buy it off the city. Officials have warned that the hard drive is “buried under 25,000 cubic meters of waste and earth” as it has been there for almost 12 years.
While the city hasn’t made a final decision, it doesn’t look good for Howells and his “needle in a haystack” plan. There are serious ecological dangers to haphazardly digging up a landfill. The excavation process would be risky and costly. Afterward, the landfill would have to be resealed, another expensive project. The city also has plans to build a solar farm on part of the land.
Finally, there’s the hard drive itself. Would there be anything recoverable after laying underneath tons and tons of trash for 12 years? It seems highly unlikely, though Howells and his investors must have some serious data retrieval specialists standing by.
[...] This is just the latest attempt by Howells to treat the landfill like an archaeological dig site, looking for his lost fortune. He’s been at this for over a decade. In 2017, he pleaded with the city to allow him to dig and officials said no, citing safety concerns and a fear of inciting treasure hunters to descend upon the landfill with shovels.
In 2021, he tried to sweeten the pot by offering the city 25 percent of the recovered Bitcoin. Once again, the city said no. In 2022, Howells came up with a particularly bizarre scheme that involved sending in Boston Dynamics robot dogs to do the digging. You can imagine what the city said to that one (it was no.)
There was another attempt to turn the landfill into a mining facility, which didn’t gain traction. Finally, Howells decided to sue the city of Newport for the right to go traipsing around in the landfill like a really gross, poop-encrusted Indiana Jones. A judge put the kibosh on the lawsuit, ruling that the case had “no realistic prospect of succeeding.”
Previously:
• High Court Ruling Ends Man's Hopes of Recovering $750M Bitcoin Hard Drive From a Welsh Landfill
• UK Man Sues City Over Discarded Bitcoin-filled Hard Drive
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Former crypto miner James Howells admits he is 'very upset' at the ruling.
The legal arguments over $750M worth of Bitcoin buried in a Welsh dump have ended unhappily for a man who lost his crypto HDD in the trash 12 years ago. On Thursday, Judge Keyser KC of the British High Court ruled James Howells' case had no reasonable chance of success at a trial. Therefore, the court sided with the council and struck out Mr Howell's legal action, in which he had hoped to gain legal access to the dump for excavation or get £495M ($604M) in compensation from the council.
We last wrote about Mr Howells's trials and tribulations in October last year, when he, backed by a consortium, decided to sue the local council "because they won't give me back my bin (trash) bag." At that time, the lost 8,000 Bitcoins were valued at $538M; today, they would be worth over $750M.
Howells' unfortunate predicament began in August 2013, when he discovered his girlfriend had taken his old laptop hard drive, which contained a wallet with Bitcoins he had mined back in 2009, to the council dump. However, Howells admits he put the device in the trash after clearing some old office bits and pieces. According to Howells, you can read precisely what happened in an excerpt from the ruling, reproduced below.
There are two major legal problems concerning this treasure in the trash. First, under UK law, anything you throw in the garbage to be collected by the council becomes the council's legal property. Second, Howells' case falls foul of the UK's six-year statute of limitations. Although the lost Bitcoins were known about in 2013, Howells only decided to sue the council in 2024.
The BBC shared some post-judgment comments from Howells in a report yesterday. In them, he admitted he was "very upset" about the decision. His statements didn't address that the council now owns the HDD/data. However, he had some interesting arguments to counter the six-year statute of limitations mentioned by the judge.
Howells told the BBC that he had been "trying to engage with Newport City Council in every way which is humanly possible for the past 12 years." This could reasonably explain the delay in legal action. He also suggested that if he had made it to trial, "there was so much more that could have been explained" and that it would have made a difference in the legal decision.
A distraught Howells repeated his offer to share the $750M crypto treasure with the council and donate 10% to the local community.
Previous: UK Man Sues City Over Discarded Bitcoin-filled Hard Drive
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday October 20 2024, @08:42AM (6 children)
Out of curiosity, I built a mining rig back when bitcoin was a fraction of a cent per - somewhere around 2010 or 2011. I ran it for a while, collected a few dozen bitcoins and then I got bored, wiped the partition and repurposed the machine to do something useful instead - because the electricity was way more expensive than the theoretical value of the digital shit I made with it.
Do I wish I had kept the hard disk intact? Yes and no:
Sure I would be richer today, but hindsight is 20/20 and it's no use crying over spilt milk. But more importantly, bitcoin ever gaining any traction was unthinkable to me because it was obviously a con even back then. To this day, I can't believe it's still a thing. And I fancy myself as too honest to participate in a con, so no regrets there.
This man who wants to dig through 10 years worth of trash obviously isn't quite as principled.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 20 2024, @09:21AM
Not only that, but he's failing to realize diminishing returns.
If he succeeds, and either he, or his contractors, or the city officials he bribes with promises, or if more than 1/5 of the people on the project try and sell a fraction of their share.. and the market will collapse.
Bitcoin isn't very liquid, it feels like. There aren't a lot of buyers. There are a lot of holders. If you sell, the price will drop. If you sell a LOT, the price will hit new lows. His claims to half a trillion dollars are bunk. He might make out with a couple million, maybe, and after that, the market for bitcoin will start bottoming out -- in zero-dollar ways.
The project is built on a pipe dream, and empty promises.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday October 20 2024, @09:42AM (1 child)
For that sum of money, there are probably quite a few people who would happily dig through the trash.
On problem (among a few others) is that his black plastic bag is buried along with a lot of other black plastic bags - assuming that they are still intact! Looking for a single 2.5" drive....? Somebody will have to open each one to find the correct bag. Nah, no thanks...
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 5, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday October 20 2024, @10:10AM
You know what? The city council should let him dig, but with a caveat: the landfill is not to be stopped during the effort - meaning the dude will be showered all day every day with fresh detritus as he digs up and sift through the old one to find his hard drive.
And the city should mandate that the landfill be surrounded by 24/7 internet cameras for everybody to roundly mock the man.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by zocalo on Sunday October 20 2024, @10:32AM (2 children)
Now, here's the thing. The EU passed the WEEE directive dealing with disposal of e-waste in 2003 (its been substantially amended since) with the aim of recycling as much e-waste as possible, and this directive was added to the UK statute books shortly thereafter. So, what were Newport council doing with the e-waste from their recycling centres in 2013, when the drive was supposdly dumped, that - according to the legally binding WEEE directive - they should have been trying to recycle as much as possible of? There are three choices - they sent it to landfill anyway, they sent it to Africa or Asia (probably) for "recycling", or they genuinely recycled it, either within the UK or overseas. The latter two of those, and the council has an instant get out of jail free card, and they wouldn't particularly want to admit the first one, so why are we even talking about excavating the local landfill? "It would have been sent to our recycling centre in wherever and shredded. Sorry, Sir, but these 'coins' of yours really are in bits."
Also, as anyone has been to a UK recycling centre will know, waste for recycling either goes into a standard shipping container (either for shipping to Asia or a local processing centre), or a large open topped skip (for local recycling, incineration, or *cough* landfill) depending on the type of waste and the council. Generally, these containers sit there for anything from a few days to several months depending on the volume of their content; I know this because I dumped a busted monitor in the e-waste container at a quite busy centre and it was still there some months later when I dropped off some more e-crap; general waste and the garden waste ones can be filled in a day at weekends, sure, but we're not dealing with those. So, upon realising his fsckup, why didn't he immediately go to the centre and either have a rummage in the relevant container for his bag or - if it was a skip - politely ask the on-site team if they could put a hold on further waste being added until the bag could be retrieved by suitably qualified personnel. Worst case, he's lucked out and a company like Veolia has already taken the container to their processing centre, where it's going to sit in a queue for shipment or recycling for some time - again a window of opportunity to get a hold put on it until the bag can be retrieved. Having dealt with both types of site, as a private individual and on behalf of a company, the staff at these places are usually pretty helpful at providing disposal advice, and will often assist with bulky objects or if you ask nicely, so it seems highly unlikely they would have refused this once it was explained that something valuable had been dumped in error (even without the promise of some beer money). Yet here we are, talking about large scale excavations of a public landfill site more than 10 years after the event.
Something stinks about this. And it's not the smell of all the garbage.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 3, Funny) by shrewdsheep on Sunday October 20 2024, @01:25PM (1 child)
Ahh, that's where the Nigerian princes have their money from.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 22 2024, @05:00PM
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Sunday October 20 2024, @09:34AM (2 children)
How is this the fault of the Newport council? It seems he, and/or the partner, tossed it out with the trash. His issue is that they won't allow him to excavate the garbage dump like some kind of archeological expedition?
I guess he just sucks it up or he finds another cryptobro and they just buy all the land the dump is on from the city. Pay all the fees and such required to get a permit and hope the drive is there and found to recover the cost.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by zocalo on Sunday October 20 2024, @10:54AM (1 child)
Someone needs to add up the probable costs of all that and explain to this Nimrod and his backers how the RoI looks, because councils in the UK are not flush with cash and there is no way they (and the taxpayer) should be footing one penny of the costs of this exercise - including the legal costs of this court case. Even if you can sail through all the permitting and regulatory requirements (which, depending on the wording of the relevant legislation, may not even be possible), the costs of doing all this are not going to be trivial, and there's no guarantee of sucess. Assuming the drive actually went to the landfill in the first place (see my post above), it's probably been through at least one crusher, has been sitting in runoff from who knows what kinds of caustic/acidic shit for over a decade, will have been repeatedly driven over by heavy plant, and suffered from 15 years of bitrot since the coins were supposely mined in 2009. $500m of BTC (roughly), less the cost required to try and find it that you're going to need to pay no matter what, multiplied by the rounding error from zero odds of the data actually been recoverable... And you can't even sell it for that, because any attempt to unload a large amount of BTC for fiat inevitably causes the price to crash, as various governments that have sold off seized BTC are well aware.
I don't think you need a calculator to tell you that far more likely results in a fool and his money being parted rather than anything tangible in a bank account.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday October 20 2024, @12:07PM
You forgot to include the cost of legal action to even get the ball rolling.... :)
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Sunday October 20 2024, @11:51AM
Life is precious, time flies, he chose to sink his in the trash together with that puny hard-drive. How happy he can be if he get 400 million but he's already 70 and wasted his life until then?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday October 20 2024, @12:59PM (1 child)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Sunday October 20 2024, @02:42PM
That's about the size of it. Even if the drive can be located, there is a very high probability that it won't read due to damage. I have to wonder a bit why it took so long to get tot his point as the odds of it being located were a lot better early on and there's presumably some form of injunction that could have been gotten earlier on to prevent the council from dumping more trash in that section while the court case went on.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday October 20 2024, @06:36PM (2 children)
The moral of this story,
The moral of this tale,
Is simply that one must ever be
Careful to keep backups.
(Score: 5, Funny) by janrinok on Sunday October 20 2024, @06:45PM (1 child)
Very wise words - but has anyone every told you that you are a crap poet?
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Tuesday October 22 2024, @10:27PM
"Files safe, peace of mind,
Digital echoes preserved,
Lost, found in the cloud"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 22 2024, @03:05AM
This highlights the importance of making and keeping at least one backup, at the least.
It also highlights the absurdity of currency and human nature/thinking, in a way. The earth provides, and we are social creatures desirous, mostly, of pretty basic things, on the whole: affection, companionship, industriousness, creativity, experience, music, and merriment, to name a few.
Money, wisely used, perhaps can enrich the human experience, but, it seems on the whole, it does not do this: it detracts from the human experience.
A desire for the security of a comfortable life, is perhaps, quite antithetic when contrasting and comparing the means with the ends.
A good understanding of chaos, and complexity, mixed with some wisdom, might bring one to become rather thankful, that, that so called, 'fortune,' was put in it's proper place.