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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 containing thousands of bitcoins was accidentally dumped 11 years ago.
Since 2013, James Howells has been hoping to recover a laptop hard drive that he says contains the secret key to a cryptocurrency he allegedly mined in 2009. Ars wrote about it at the time. awareness that the price of bitcoin had just passed $1,000, making 7,500 bitcoins worth $7.5 million.
The number of bitcoins has changed slightly, with Howells now claiming to have lost 8,000 bitcoins. The price of bitcoin more than $100,000 last month and was worth more than $95,636 as of last Friday, or $765 million for 8,000 bitcoins.
Supreme Court Justice Keyser KC delivered his opinion control last week, he is fighting the defendant Howells v. Newport City Council. Mr Howell does not have a good chance of winning the case, the judge ruled. Howells wanted “an order that the defendant either save the solids from the car or allow his team of experts to dig the dump to find it, and (instead) compensation equal to the value of Bitcoin that they can no longer find.”
The Landfill Manager Is Who Owns the Waste
The council said the excavation of the landfill would release harmful substances into the environment, putting people at risk of “dangerous health and environmental risks,” the decision said.
The judge found no “reasonable grounds for bringing this case,” stating that he had “no realistic prospect of success at trial and that there is no other reasonable cause to be resolved at trial.” He granted summary judgment to the defendant, denying the motion.
The decision quoted from the Control of Pollution Act 1974, which states that “everything submitted to the authority by another person during the use of the site shall be an authority and may be dealt with accordingly.” Howells “suggested that section 14(6)(c) merely states that anything given shall remain in possession but does not state that it ceases to belong to its former owner,” the ruling said. The judge did not agree with this, and wrote that “the word ‘shall be of jurisdiction’ is inappropriate and unlimited.”
The judge found no reason to find that defendant’s retention of the hard drive was “unconscionable” under the law. “In my opinion there would be no real hope of finding that the defendant’s storage of the Hard Drive was inconsistent. The plaintiff was not keeping it for profit or because he wanted to. He was keeping it because he was buried in the mud,” he said. the decision said.
The Law of Limitations
The verdict is also barred by the six-year statute of limitations because Howells “knew the facts of his allegations by November 2013 but did not begin trial until May 2024,” the ruling said.
The judge did not need to rule on whether the hard drive has access to bitcoin, saying that “the only issues in this case concern the ownership of, and the right to access, the Hard Drive.” Mr Howell had sought a landfill site in Newport, Wales, since November 2013 but was rejected by local authorities. The hard drive is said to be 2½ inches in size and contains a wallet.dat file that contains a private key that can be used to access bitcoins.
The city council said the excavation would breach its licenses with the NRW (Natural Resources Body for Wales), pose a health and safety risk to workers, damage the risk of walking under the excavation work or afterwards, and prevent the council from “removing” ) its waste disposal services when the site is being excavated.”
