A British judge has ruled against a man who wants to dig up a landfill where he believes a tough drive with access to thousands of bitcoins was mistakenly abandoned more than 11 years ago.
Since 2013, James Howells has been hoping to recover a laptop tough drive that he claims contains the private key to a cryptocurrency he claims he mined in 2009. Ars wrote about it then: noticing that the value of Bitcoin has just passed $1,000, making 7,500 Bitcoins worth $7.5 million.
The alleged bitcoin count has changed slightly, and Howells now claims to have lost 8,000 bitcoins. Bitcoin price exceeded $100,000 last month and as of last Friday was worth more than $95,636, or $765 million for 8,000 bitcoins.
Supreme Court Justice Keyser KC issued his opinion ruling last week, siding with the accused in Howells v Newport City Council. Howells has no real chance of success at trial, the judge ruled. Howells sought “to order the defendant to deliver the hard drive or allow his team of experts to search the storage facility to find it and (alternatively) damages equal to the value of the Bitcoin to which he no longer has access.” “
The landfill management owns the garbage
The council said excavation at the landfill would allow harmful substances to enter the environment, exposing residents to “potentially earnest risks that raise public health and environmental issues,” the ruling said.
The judge found no “reasonable basis for bringing this case,” concluding that it “has no real prospect of success if it goes to trial and that there is no other compelling reason why it should be decided at trial.” He issued a summary judgment in favor of the accused, dismissing the claim.
The ruling cites the Pollution Control Act 1974, which states that “anything supplied to the authority by another person in the course of using the premises belongs to the authority and may be dealt with accordingly.” Howells “presented that Art. 14 section 6 letter (c) only states that everything delivered in this way will belong to the authority, but does not say that it will cease to belong to the previous owner,” the ruling stated. The judge disagreed, writing that “the words ‘belongs to the government’ are open and unlimited.”
The judge found no reason to find that the defendant’s retention of the hard drive was “frivolous” under the law. “In my view, there is no realistic prospect of finding that the defendant’s retention of the hard drive was inappropriate. The defendant did not keep it for profit or because he wanted to. He kept it because it was buried in a landfill,” the ruling said.
Statute of limitations
The claim is also time-barred due to the six-year statute of limitations because Howells “had knowledge of the facts material to his claim as early as November 2013 but did not commence proceedings until May 2024.” – stated in the ruling.
The judge did not have to rule on whether the hard drive actually contained access to the bitcoins, stating that “the only relevant issues in this case concern ownership of the hard drive and rights to access it.” Howells had been seeking access to a landfill in Newport, Wales, since November 2013, but local officials refused. It says the hard drive is 2.5 inches in size and contains a wallet.dat file containing a private key that can allow access to bitcoins.
The town council stated that the excavation would breach the terms of the license issued by NRW (Natural Resources Authority for Wales), would create a risk to the health and safety of staff, would risk damage from ground movement during or after excavation, and would prevent the council ” discharge[ing] its statutory functions relating to the disposal of waste during excavation activities.”