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A British judge has ruled against a man who wants to dig up a landfill where he says a hard drive with access to thousands of bitcoins was misplaced 11 years ago.
Since 2013, James Howells has been hoping to recover a laptop hard drive that he says contains the private key for the cryptocurrency he says he mined in 2009. Ars wrote about this at the time, noticing that the value of a bitcoin had just passed $1,000, making 7,500 bitcoins worth $7.5 million.
The alleged amount of bitcoins has changed slightly, with Howells now saying he lost 8,000 bitcoins. The price of bitcoin exceeded $100,000 last month and was $95,636 as of last Friday, or $765 million for 8,000 bitcoins.
High Court Judge Keyser KC issued his kingdom last week, crashing with the accused in Howells v. Newport City Council. Howells has no realistic chance of success at trial, the judge said. Howells sought “an order that the defendant either provide the hard drive or allow his team of experts to dig the landfill to find it, and (alternatively) compensation equivalent to the value of the Bitcoin that can no longer be accessed “
The Landfill Authority Owns the Trash
The council said the excavation of the landfill site would allow harmful substances to escape into the environment, endangering residents with “potentially serious risks that raise public health and environmental concerns,” the ruling said.
The judge found no “reasonable grounds for bringing this case,” saying that “it has no realistic prospect of success if it were to go to trial and that there is no other compelling reason why it should be disposed of in the process”. He granted summary judgment to the defendant, dismissing the claim.
The decision cites the Control of Pollution Act 1974, which states that “anything handed over to the authority by another person in the course of using the facilities belongs to the authority and may be dealt with accordingly “. Howells “argued that section 14(6)(c) simply said that anything delivered would belong to the authority, but did not say that it would cease to belong to its former owner,” the judgment said . The judge disagreed, writing that “the words “shall belong to the authority” are unqualified and unrestricted.”
The judge found no reason to determine that the defendant holding the hard drive is “unconscionable” under the law. “In my view, there would be no realistic prospect of finding that the retention of the hard drive by the accused was inconceivable. The accused was not retained for profit or because he wanted it. He kept it because he was buried in a landfill,” the ruling said.
Statute of Limitations
The claim 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 decision said.
The judge did not need to determine whether the hard drive actually contained access to bitcoin, saying that “the only relevant issues in this case relate to ownership and access rights to the Hard Drive.” Howells sought access to the landfill site in Newport, Wales, beginning in November 2013, but local officials refused. He says the hard drive is 2½ inches in size and has a wallet.dat file that contains a private key that can allow access to bitcoin.
The council said the excavation would breach the terms of its license with NRW (Natural Resources Body for Wales), cause health and safety risks for staff, risk damage from earth movement during or after excavation works, and prevent the council from “discharging (ing). ) its statutory waste disposal duties while the site is being excavated.
