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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.
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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.
(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