A British judge has ruled against a man who wants to dig up a landfill where a hard drive containing access to thousands of bitcoins was mistakenly dumped more than 11 years ago.
Since 2013, James Howells has been hoping to recover a laptop hard drive that he says contains the private key to a cryptocurrency he says he mined in 2009. Ars wrote at the time that, taking notes that the value of bitcoin has just passed $1000, which means that 7500 bitcoins are worth $7.5 million.
The alleged number of bitcoins has changed slightly, with Howells now saying he lost 8,000 bitcoins. Bitcoin price exceeded $100,000 last month and was worth over $95,636 as of last Friday, or $765 million for 8,000 bitcoins.
High Court Judge Keyser KC issued his ruling last week, siding with the accused Howells v Newport City Council. Howells has no realistic chance of success at trial, the judge ruled. Howells sought “an order that the defendant either deliver the hard drive or allow its team of experts to excavate the dump to find it, and (in the alternative) compensation equivalent to the value of the Bitcoins it can no longer access.”
The Waste Landfill Administration owns the garbage
The council said digging up the landfill would allow harmful substances to escape into the environment, exposing residents to “potentially serious risks that raise public health and environmental concerns,” the ruling said.
The judge found no “reasonable grounds for bringing this case”, saying there was “no realistic prospect of success if it went to trial and no other compelling reason why it should be dismissed at trial”. He granted summary judgment for the defendant, dismissing the claim.
The ruling cites the Pollution Control Act of 1974, which states that “anything delivered to the authorities by another person during the use of the facilities belongs to the authorities and may be dealt with accordingly.” Howells “submitted that section 14(6)(c) only says that anything so delivered belongs to the authority, but does not say that it shall cease to belong to its former owner,” the judgment said. The judge disagreed, writing that “the words ‘shall belong to the authorities’ are unqualified and open-ended.”
The judge found no reason to find that the defendant who retained the hard drive was “unconscionable” under the law. “In my opinion, there would be no realistic prospect of establishing that the defendant’s retention of the hard drive was negligent. The defendant did not keep it for profit or because he wanted it. He kept it because it was buried in a landfill,” the verdict reads.
Out of date
The suit is also barred by the six-year statute of limitations because Howells “knew the facts material 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 had access to bitcoin, saying that “the only relevant issues in this case concern the ownership and right of access to the hard drive.” Since November 2013, Howells has been seeking access to a landfill in Newport, Wales, but local officials have refused. It says the hard drive is 2½ inches in size and has a wallet.dat file that contains a private key that can provide access to bitcoin.
The city council said the excavation would breach the conditions of its NRW (Natural Resources Authority for Wales) licence, cause health and safety risks to staff, risk damage from ground movement during or after excavation work and prevent the council from “dropping[ing] its legal waste disposal functions while the site is being excavated.”