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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: 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...
"Cervantes definitely was prescient in describing a senile Don fighting against windmills." -- larryjoe on /.