Man's 11-year quest to recover $765 million in Bitcoin by digging through landfills ended by judge

A British judge has ruled against a man who wanted to dig up a landfill where he said a hard drive with access to thousands of bitcoins was mistakenly dumped 11 years ago.

Since 2013, James Howells has been hoping to recover a laptop hard drive that he said contained the private keys to a cryptocurrency he mined in 2009. Ars reported on this at the time, noting that Bitcoin was worth just over $1,000, making 7,500 Bitcoins worth $7.5 million.

There have been some changes to the alleged number of Bitcoins, and Howells now claims he lost 8,000 Bitcoins. The price of Bitcoin exceeded $100,000 last month, and as of Friday was $95,636, or 8,000 Bitcoins worth $765 million.

High Court Judge Keyser KC issued his ruling last week, siding with the defendants Howells v Newport City Council. The judge ruled that Howells had no realistic chance of success at trial. Howells seeks “an order that the defendant either deliver the hard drive or allow his team of experts to excavate the landfill to find it, and (as an alternative) compensation equal to the value of the Bitcoins he can no longer access.”

Landfill holds garbage

The committee said digging up landfills would allow hazardous materials to escape into the environment, posing “potentially serious risks to residents, raising public health concerns and environmental concerns,” the ruling said.

The judge found there was “no reasonable ground for bringing the case” and said “there was no realistic prospect of success if it went to trial and there were no other compelling reasons why the case should be dealt with at trial.” He granted summary judgment to the defendants. , dismissed its claim.

The ruling cited the Pollution Control Act 1974, which states that “anything delivered to the authority by another person in the course of the use of a facility belongs to the authority and may be dealt with accordingly”. The ruling said Howells “submitted that section 14(6)(c) only provided that anything so delivered belonged to the authority but did not provide that it ceased to belong to its former owner.” The judge disagreed, and wrote “The words 'shall belong to the authorities' are unqualified and unqualified.”

The judge had no reason to find that the defendant's retention of the hard drive was legally “unreasonable.” “In my view it is unlikely to conclude that the defendant's retention of the hard drive was unconscionable. The defendant did not retain it for profit or because it wanted it. It retained it because it was buried in a landfill,” the ruling said.

statute of limitations

The claim was also subject to a six-year statute of limitations because Howells “had knowledge of facts material to his claim before November 2013 but did not commence proceedings until May 2024,” the ruling said.

The judge did not need to rule on whether the hard drive actually contained access to the Bitcoins, saying “the only relevant issues in this case relate to the ownership of and access to the hard drive.” Howells began seeking to enter the Welsh New Territory in November 2013. Porter's landfill, but was rejected by local officials. He said the hard drive was 2.5 inches in size and had a wallet.dat file that contained the private keys to access Bitcoin.

The council said the excavation would breach the terms of its license with the Natural Resources Agency of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), create health and safety risks for workers, risk of damage from ground movement during or after the excavation work, and Preventing the City Council from “discharging ( ) its statutory waste disposal function during site excavation.”