A judge has ended a man’s 11-year quest to recover $765 million in Bitcoin by digging up a landfill

A British judge has ruled against a man who wanted to excavate a landfill where he says a hard drive with access to thousands of bitcoins was accidentally disposed of more than 11 years ago.

Since 2013, James Howells has been hoping to recover the laptop hard drive that he says contains the private key to the cryptocurrency he says he mined in 2009. Ars wrote about it at the time, Pointing The value of one bitcoin has just surpassed $1,000, making 7,500 bitcoins worth $7.5 million.

The claimed number of bitcoins has changed slightly, with Howells now saying he lost 8,000 bitcoins. Bitcoin price It exceeded $100,000 last month and was worth more than $95,636 as of last Friday, or $765 million for 8,000 bitcoins.

High Court Judge Keser KC delivered his decision to rule Last week, standing by the defendant Howells v. Newport City Council. The judge ruled Howells had no realistic chance of succeeding at trial. Howells requested “an order that the defendant either surrender the hard drive or allow his team of experts to excavate the dump in order to find it, and (in the alternative) compensation equal to the value of the Bitcoin he no longer has access to.”

The landfill authority owns the trash

The council said excavation of the landfill site would allow harmful materials to leak into the environment, exposing residents to “potentially serious risks that raise public health issues and environmental concerns,” the ruling said.

The judge did not find “reasonable grounds for filing this case,” saying that it “has no realistic prospect of success if referred to trial, and that there is no other compelling reason for it to be decided at trial.” He issued a summary judgment for the defendant to dismiss the case.

The ruling quotes the Pollution Control Act 1974, which states that “anything handed over to the Authority by another person while using facilities shall be the property of the Authority and may be dealt with accordingly.” Howells “argued that section 14(6)(c) only provides that anything so surrendered shall belong to the authority, but does not provide that it shall cease to belong to its previous owner,” the ruling said. The judge disagreed, writing that “the phrase ‘belongs to authority’ is unqualified and unqualified.”

The judge found no reason to determine that the defendant’s retention of the hard drive was “unreasonable” under the law. “In my view, there would be no realistic prospect of arriving at a conclusion that the defendant’s retention of the hard drive was unreasonable. The defendant was not keeping it for gain or because he wanted to. Rather, he was keeping it because it was buried in a landfill.” The referee said.

Statute of limitations

The lawsuit is also barred by a six-year statute of limitations because Howells “was aware of the material facts relating to his claim by 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 Bitcoin, saying that “the only relevant issues in this case relate to ownership of the hard drive and rights to access it.” Howells sought access to a landfill site in Newport, Wales, starting in November 2013, but was denied access by local officials. He says the hard drive is 2½ inches in size and contains a Wallet.dat file that contains a private key that can enable access to Bitcoin.

The city council said the excavation would breach the terms of its license with Natural Resources Wales, create health and safety risks for staff, risk damage from ground movement during or after the excavation, and prevent the council from “offloading”. ) its legal functions to dispose of waste while excavating the site.”