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
Related Stories
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.
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
The excellent student run newspaper, The Michigan Daily, has an article about the necessity of regulating Bitcoin. "Mining" even a single Bitcoin now burns as much electricity as a family would use during about 50 days.
Local grids physically cannot withstand this outrageous consumption of electricity. In foreign countries — where mining farm clustering is more severe — local governments suspect Bitcoin mining farms as the cause of power outages and complete blackouts. Entire neighborhoods are facing power shortages or complete outages as a result of energy grid strain. So far, the reliance on domestic energy has not had adverse effects, but it is only a matter of time before these blackouts begin to take place in the United States, too.
Despite the fatal externality flaws in Bitcoin mining, the industry is left unchecked in the absence of federal or international regulation on its use. Unfortunately, without restrictions on the amount of mining that can occur, there is no clear plateau to the electricity consumption of these constantly updating hardware systems.
Previously:
(2025) Bitcoin Mining is Making People Sick
(2025) The Guy Who Accidentally Threw Away $700 Million in Bitcoin Wants to Buy the Landfill to Find It
(2024) How A 27-Year-Old Busted The Myth Of Bitcoin's Anonymity
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Sunday February 16 2025, @09:06PM (6 children)
I knew a guy who went after the Canadian 'Tax Man', over a loop-hole he had discovered. They said he needed to pay taxes on something and he said he didn't.
He spent all his free time putting together his case and fighting it. He had retired and had no life except for this 'fight'.
Then he died. The fight was over about $1500 dollars.
Retired, had no life.
This British guy is taking a huge gamble and spending all his time on this. Yes the payout would be big if he could recover even half, unless of course his out-lay is significant, but...
...is this guy enjoying life?
Is he surrounded by anyone loving him? Wanting to spend time with him? Does he travel, enjoy life, make others happy?
Sounds like a net loss to me.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 4, Interesting) by progo on Sunday February 16 2025, @09:29PM
(Score: 3, Touché) by Tork on Sunday February 16 2025, @09:38PM (2 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈 - Give us ribbiti or make us croak! 🐸
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday February 17 2025, @02:12AM (1 child)
It depends a lot on what they're looking for. If it's gold or something similarly durable and it's a matter of not knowing where it is, that's one thing. But, if it's something like this where even if they do locate it, which they will eventually if they acquire the whole dump, they aren't guaranteed that the data can be recovered. IMHO, that puts it somewhere in between a treasure hunt and the lottery.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by zocalo on Monday February 17 2025, @08:33AM
The a reason why former landfills in the UK now tend to get turned into things like pasture, nature parks, and solar farms - you can reuse the land without having to dig down too deep and disturbing the crap underneath until it's had a chance to properly break down, and that takes a *long* time. We know this because due to land pressure in the UK we learnt the hard way what happens if you build things like houses or business parks on a former waste sites, and it's an environmental, legal, and financial nightmare for all involved. A housing developer was knocked back not so long ago because they were looking at a former local landfill that hadn't been used since 1970, and that was just going to involve excavation of down to foundation and drainage level for which they supposedly had a handling plan. That's maybe a couple of meters at most, a lot of which would be into the backfill used to cover the waste, and Howells would need to go a lot deeper than that.
It's not happening, and the sooner he realises that and gets on with his life the better it's going to be, but from the sound of things he's already past that point and is allowing this to consume him. That is not going to end well.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 16 2025, @10:04PM
If you want to make all those people happy, then just put some electrodes in their brains to make them happy. It wouldn't be that hard.
If you want to do it naturally, then you have to accept that some people just can't be happy in the obvious way. If this guy could just walk away from this, he'd have done so.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday February 17 2025, @08:45AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleak_House [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Frosty Piss on Sunday February 16 2025, @10:18PM
The ridiculousness of this is obvious: Even if he finds the drive (unlikely), the possibility of recovering anything from it is so infinitesimal as to be essentially zero.
I think it's even possible that the guy is completely full of shit, and is making it all up, or has a mental issue that has created this fantasy.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Username on Sunday February 16 2025, @10:51PM (2 children)
It should be an easy recovery, most of those older drives could survive a dumptruck driving over it. The platters are what matter. The arm and controller can be taken off another drive of same type. The hard part would be finding it. If he has a reasonable bid, why not? There is no loss to the state. They still can build their solar farm there after he's done. Unless, there is something there they don't want him to uncover. Makes you wonder.
I RTFA on The Guardian, and half of it is about Trump. I wouldn't think a european island website would have this level of TDS.
(Score: 4, Informative) by aafcac on Monday February 17 2025, @02:14AM
I think the issue is that the areas of the landfill that emit the most gases are the ones that have been disturbed. The other bits still emit some gases, but not anywhere near as much. There's also issues in terms of the extra emissions that happen due to the solar farm being delayed.
(Score: 2) by corey on Tuesday February 18 2025, @09:38PM
I agree, spinning hard drives are pretty damn robust. The platters are 1-2mm thick. The main issue is probably heat and magnetic sources. Heat (as in say 90C+ would start to erase the magnetic information - remember to denagnetise a tool, you heat it?). In a landfill with lots of biological composting, it can get hot. Otherwise, I’d do the same. I think he’s got a much better chance at this than winning the lottery.
Re the Guardian - I used to read the Australian edition every day. Can’t any more. The level of pro Palestinian content and spin got too much. They are fully cranked anti Trump, too.
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Sunday February 16 2025, @11:25PM
" though Howells and his investors must have some serious data retrieval specialists standing by. "
Maybe the specialists said "it is difficult but sure, there IS a possibility, lets's do it", thinking of making money out of this person or investors.
(Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Monday February 17 2025, @12:31AM (1 child)
Assuming he can get access to the site, he's going to need money to dig, correct? Where is that going to come from? Isn't it going to cost millions to do the digging and searching? Isn't it going to take a very long time? How is this guy going to pay for this? He's a crackpot.
(Score: 4, Funny) by looorg on Monday February 17 2025, @12:47AM
He could probably borrow from someone against that. But if he doesn't find the drive I wouldn't want to be him, or his kneecaps.
(Score: 2) by FuzzyTheBear on Monday February 17 2025, @10:27AM
Some people just don't know when to quit.
Drive's gone , he should deal with it and be glad he's got one hell of a story to tell his grandchildren.
After all that time spent buried in a landfill we can all imagine easily that the drive's past recovery.
For his own sanity , time to let go ,
Talk aabout loosing one's marbles.
(Score: 2) by Ox0000 on Monday February 17 2025, @01:11PM
Price bidding starts at 700,000,001 USD. After all, apparently there's 700M worth of assets in the ground there...
Oh, and the sale conditions should contain a requirement to sanitize and redevelop the area into a healthy, beautiful public park with personal non-severable liability by the buyer on failure to complete this sanitizing and redevelopment.