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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: 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.