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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
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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
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
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.
...
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.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday January 15 2025, @03:13PM (7 children)
Offer 89.9% to the council, 10% to the local community. Keep the rest (well, also pay for the excavation and renaturation).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 15 2025, @03:30PM (6 children)
The council is completely convinced the man is cracked in the head, they think (perhaps correctly) that odds are higher of a Mega Millions lottery win.
It would be an interesting test of BTC resiliency though, extracting $750M cash at a chunk like that. If Muskrat or similar didn't step in to prop up the value I suspect it would crash it very low indeed.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday January 15 2025, @06:29PM (5 children)
It's not just finding the drive, it's also for the drive not to have been damaged in transport or over the years that it's been buried. It just takes a relatively small hole to allow for moisture and various other stuff to get to the platters and corrupt them. And, we're talking about a set of encrypted files and being able to identify that they've found the correct one, which if it's been corrupted may not be that easy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 15 2025, @09:28PM (3 children)
I mean, $750M is quite the temptation, but I had a lot of experience with thinly traded stock in a public company. It's up at 50, woo hoo, I sell $5000 worth and all of a sudden it's back down to 30. There's only a small amount of "buy orders" out there ready to hand you cash for shares at the top price shown. The more you sell, the lower it goes, and if you start moving hundreds of millions of dollars a lot of those buy orders are likely to disappear while you're trying to execute.
Still, it's like my short lived thought experiment of a wind farm in Western Nebraska - I might have been able to pull it off and make more money than I did in a salaried job- maybe, but guaranteed: win or lose I would have spent a LOT of time in Western Nebraska, or trusted my fortunes to hired hands who likely lower my chances of success overall - least not by paying them for things I could do myself.
I don't know if I'd want to spend my next 10 years digging in a landfill, even if there were a pot of gold at the end of it all.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday January 15 2025, @09:54PM
I think the fact that in recent years it's gone up like that is probably part of why the suit was filed at all. The comparatively low price when it first got tossed was probably also why it took so long for this to escalate into a lawsuit. I'm not surprised that the council doesn't want people digging in there, there are a lot of safety issues and the portions that are recently dug up seem to account for a bigger chunk of the emissions.
The only times I've ever heard of anybody digging in a landfill have mostly been in search of bodies, evidence or those old ET cartridges in New Mexico. The number of ways this can go wrong is long, and even if they do find it, it could be a problem to know if it's the correct hard drive if the platters have been too damaged.
(Score: 2) by owl on Wednesday January 15 2025, @10:25PM (1 child)
If you have sufficient stock such that you could be moving hundreds of millions of dollars you also are supposed to file SEC disclosures of the fact that on day X you will be selling Y number of shares.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 16 2025, @12:24AM
>If you have sufficient stock such that you could be moving hundreds of millions of dollars you also are supposed to file SEC disclosures of the fact that on day X you will be selling Y number of shares.
That's stock, and I think Musky ran afoul of similar rules recently regarding how much Twitter he owned when vs disclosures.
In the wild wild BTC-verse there are no such requirements, but people can snoop the pre-order chain - probably hours in advance of the trade happening, though I'm not sure how you can rescind a trade order once you've put it out there.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by RedGreen on Thursday January 16 2025, @11:34AM
"t just takes a relatively small hole to allow for moisture"
Like the do not cover this hole sticker I have seen for that tiny hole on just about every hard drive I have ever had in my hands...
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 2) by Adam on Wednesday January 15 2025, @03:13PM (5 children)
Seems odd that with that kind of money at stake, he couldn't work something out with the council that would benefit both parties, unless the odds of a successful recovery are minuscule. There's probably no compelling reason for the council to turn down $100M to let this guy bring in a few excavators and have a dig. Maybe there wasn't enough venture capital available to him.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 15 2025, @03:17PM (2 children)
Unless, of course, somebody on the council already grabbed the hard drive.
But either way: Dude, you need a better backup strategy.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 5, Funny) by Tork on Wednesday January 15 2025, @03:26PM
Are there any news stories about a council member buying an island or an iPhone?
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈 - Give us ribbiti or make us croak! 🐸
(Score: 5, Informative) by aafcac on Wednesday January 15 2025, @05:46PM
I think it's more likely that the drive was cracked when it went through the garbage truck's compactor and even if located, the platters would be damaged beyond recovery. These keys are supposed to be secure, do even more vulnerable to corruption.
I'd feel bad for him, if he actually earned any of the money.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday January 15 2025, @05:35PM (1 child)
Or that he waited 11 years to do anything about it. If you had done something back then it would've at least been in a relatively shallow stratum...
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday January 15 2025, @09:15PM
That's a major problem. This isn't the primary reason for a statute of limitations on cases, but it is one of the reasons. As time goes by, evidence is harder to collect, witnesses forget what they may have seen and even the actual item of the dispute can be rendered moot by the passage of time. I do appreciate that he may have been trying to avoid the law suit, but if he wasn't making any progress in that first year, the ability to find the drive would have been a lot better and the legal arguments probably a lot simpler.
I assume that part of the delay as to do with the change in price on BTC making it more worth searching the dump for than when it was initially tossed. But, even if it had been tossed and immediately recovered, the moment that it goes in the truck and the truck crunches it, it may already be too late, even if you can convince people to set the garbage from just that one truck aside while the issues are dealt with in court.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pTamok on Wednesday January 15 2025, @03:36PM (3 children)
When Bitcoin was new, and easy to generate, and people were paying for pizzas with whole Bitcoin, I thought about generating a few.
I didn't.
Partly because of the lack of opportunities to use them where I was at the time, and partly I thought that the hassle of keeping a secure and reliable backup were not justified (I didn't think they would take off - how wrong I was).
It's one of those life decisions that in retrospect you wish you had done the other way. I have a few of those, as did my father, who did not take the opportunity to buy some property that would have been a startlingly good investment.
Sigh.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday January 15 2025, @03:59PM (2 children)
That's absolutely the wrong way to think about it, it's just hindsight 20/20. About investments: ask yourself whether you were sure that the investment would be successful. You are never sure, you can only be reasonably certain. If you are honest, most of the time the answer is: I don't know. You have to weigh the risks against possible rewards and therefor hindsight 20/20 is never justified. Even if you have insight into the technology and you know a company is doing the right thing and is well managed, always remember, it only takes a single fraud to ruin everything.
About bitcoin: I think most here have seen the very beginnings on slashdot. We all (?) had our reasons not to chip in. Obviously we were not sure at the time it would take off. That's enough reason not to invest (or mine).
Here is some good advice: buy the winning lottery ticket next time, for otherwise you will be disappointed that you hadn't.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Wednesday January 15 2025, @04:38PM
The trick with investing and speculation is to be rich enough in the first place that you can afford to lose your stake and not care.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2025, @06:06PM
Yes that was the first time I found out about it, I think September 2009 from what I remember. I did actually mine it though, ended up with many many hundreds of BTC using nothing more than some CPUs.
However I never thought it would grow this big so I sold a good chunk of them for a mortgage deposit in 2011-12 or so. Ironically shortly after buying the flat BTC shot up in price so much I could have bought the flat outright without the 35 year debt around my neck, but there you go.
As a friend said back then "it could have gone either way", BTC could well have dropped to zero as much as it shot up, there was no way of knowing at the time.
The remaining BTC I held on for the next decade or so until regulations caught up, VASP certified CeFi investments showed up, and then I decided to invest my BTC to generate income so I could finally leave my crappy job and enjoy life. However I got defrauded of the entire lot, so I'm back to square one now.
It was a lesson for me. For every BTC millionaire out there, there are many who lost out, either due to losing their BTC through fraud (such as myself), carelessness (like the guy in TFA throwing away his wallet) or just missing out of the chance to get some when it was within reach.
There is no point being upset about the past misses, rather than dwell in regret on how rich I could have been if only I held onto the BTC I concentrate on how I can improve my life in future. I likewise don't think I would have spent decades locked in legal action for the right to dig through tons of garbage in order for the hope of finding the HDD (if it even still works and has recoverable data on it, it could well have been crushed by tons of garbage by that time).
Saying that, over the years BTC for me as ceased to be what it was originally designed for, namely an internet currency. It has become nothing more then speculation in the hope for people to get rich by selling it on. The crypto space is also rife with fraudsters so the only benefit of buying crypto is to put it in your hard wallet and leave it there until you want to sell to buy some real, income producing assets.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Thursday January 16 2025, @08:42AM
Every year this guy comes out again.
1) The hard drive is long, long, long dead by now. It's been in open landfill for 12 years. Rain, mud, sleet, snow, ice, goop, rust, waste food, all washing over it constantly every day. Not to mention bacteria and all kinds of other stuff just eating away at the casing / platters.
2) As soon as it was disposed of, it was legally the council's property. Including, potentially, whatever's on it. And even they don't think it's worth digging back up - and didn't the first time this ever came up.
3) Finding the drive will be tricky but not impossible, and the guy can only offer to pay for all that work out of any potential result. Which is likely zero. Why would they spend stupid amounts of money to dig up and sift thousands of tons of rubbish (potentially dangerous now, because of the sheer depth and contents) and potentially see nothing for it?
4) Think of the precedent. Oh, I threw my wedding ring / child's favourite toy / important papers / my favourite laptop away... hey, council, you need to dig it all back up and give it back to me. It would never work. And they'd spend more time and money digging through old landfill than they ever would collecting it and doing their job.
5) There are a number of third-parties involved here, not least himself, but lawyers, health and safety, workers, contractors, etc. All of them will want paying, want assurances, etc. and will be making up their bill for something that they don't do and have never done.
It's gone, forget it. And stop wasting the court's and council's time. Every year he comes out of the woodwork, suing someone else, getting onto the news again, and each time you just think "Where's your backup, and what on earth are you expecting to find?"
That drive is gone. If it had the world's nuclear secrets on it, nobody would bother trying to recover it now.