A British judge ruled against a man who wants to excavate a landfill where he says a hard drive with access to thousands of bitcoins was mistakenly dumped over 11 years ago.
Since 2013, James Howells has been waiting for a computer’s hard drive that he says contains the personal key to the cryptocurrency he claims to have mined in 2009. Ars had spoken about it at the time, noting that the price of one bitcoin had just gone up. It surpassed $1,000, or 7,500 bitcoins worth $7. 5 million.
The alleged amount of bitcoins has changed a bit, and Howells now claims to have lost 8,000 bitcoins. The value of bitcoin surpassed $100,000 last month and stood at $95,636 on Friday, or $765 million for 8,000 bitcoins.
Superior Court Judge Keyser KC issued his ruling last week, siding with the defendant in Howells v. Newport City Council. Howells has no realistic chance of good luck at trial, the ruling ruled. Howells requested “an order for the defendant to surrender the hard drive or allow his team of experts to search the landfill and (alternatively) a refund equal to the price of the Bitcoin he can no longer access. “.
The council said digging up the landfill would leach destructive ingredients into the environment, putting citizens in danger with “potentially serious threats that would raise concerns about public health and the environment,” the council said. judgment.
The judge found no “reasonable grounds for bringing this case,” saying it has “no realistic prospect of succeeding if it went to trial and that there is no other compelling reason why it should be disposed of at trial.” He granted summary judgment for the defendant, dismissing the claim.
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The ruling quotes the Control of Pollution Act 1974, which states that “anything delivered to the authority by another person in the course of using the facilities shall belong to the authority and may be dealt with accordingly.” Howells “submitted that section 14(6)(c) merely says that anything so delivered shall belong to the authority but does not say that it shall cease to belong to its former owner,” the ruling said. The judge disagreed, writing that “the words ‘shall belong to the authority’ are unqualified and unrestricted.”
The ruling uncovered no explanation as to why the defendant’s retention of the hard drive is “unacceptable” under the law. “In my view, there would be no realistic prospect of concluding that the defendant’s retention of the hard drive was impermissible. “The defendant did not suspend it for profit or because he wanted to. He kept it because it was buried in a landfill,” the ruling says.
The claim is also time-barred due to the six-year statute of limitations, as Howells “knew the facts of his claim in November 2013, but did not initiate the proceedings until May 2024,” according to the resolution.
The judge didn’t need to rule on whether the hard drive really contains access to bitcoin, saying that “the only relevant issues in this case concern ownership of, and rights of access to, the Hard Drive.” Howells sought access to the landfill site in Newport, Wales, starting in November 2013, but local officials refused. He says the hard drive is 2½ inches in size and has a wallet.dat file containing a private key that can enable access to the bitcoin.
The city council said 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 ground movement during or after excavation work, and prevent the council from “discharg[ing] its statutory waste disposal functions whilst the site is excavated.”
After their November 2013 approach, Howells “repeatedly asked Defendant to access the site to locate the hard drive, but Defendant largely ignored them,” the ruling states. “The plaintiff then sought investment and expertise to enable a team of experts to adopt a dig and operate operation for a landfill and, in 2023, began to officially claim its track record with the defendant. »
The BBC yesterday quoted Howells as saying that “the case being struck out at the earliest hearing doesn’t even give me the opportunity to explain myself or an opportunity for justice in any shape or form. There was so much more that could have been explained in a full trial and that’s what I was expecting.”
“It’s not about greed, I’m happy to share the proceeds but nobody in a position of power will have a decent conversation with me … This ruling has taken everything from me and left me with nothing. It’s the great British injustice system striking again,” he said.
In January 2021, CNN wrote that Howells “offered to pay the council a quarter of the existing treasure price, which he said could simply be distributed among local residents. “
As to how the hard drive was sent to the landfill, Howells claims he “disposed of her home without her permission or consent on the morning of August 5, 2013,” the ruling states.
His ex-girlfriend, Halfina Eddy-Evans, said in a recent interview with The Daily Mail that she brought the hard drive and other unwanted belongings to the dump at Howells’ request. “I thought he should be running his errands, not me, but I did it to help out … I’d love nothing more than him to find it. I’m sick and tired of hearing about it,” she said.
The resolution describes Howells’ performance at the 2013 event as follows:
In his drawers, he discovered two hard drives: one was the hard drive and the other was a blank hard drive that contained no data. He intended to throw away the blank hard drive, but instead, he mistakenly took the hard drive and put it in one of the black trash bags. He then left the two trash bags in his space downstairs and asked his spouse at the time to take them to the landfill the day after completing the school course. However, he said he didn’t need to bring the black trash bags to the site and had refused to do so. The plaintiff did not get too involved with his refusal, since the next morning he would check that he had put the correct hard drive in the garbage bags. However, when she woke up at nine o’clock in the morning the next day, she discovered that her spouse had replaced her brain and that she had already brought the garbage bags to the site and manually deposited them in the site’s general trash bins.
The judgment cites testimonies according to which “the landfill comprises about 350,000 tons of waste, to which another 50,000 tons are added per year. Once the receiving domain’s dumpster is filled, the waste is dumped into the landfill, where it is then covered with an inert curtain to minimize fuel or liquid leakage, and then compacted.
Howells believes the hard drive may still be usable, according to a 2021 New Yorker article. “Although the coating on the drive was metal, the inside of the drive was glass,” wrote journalist D. T. Max. “‘It’s coated with a layer of anti-corrosion cobalt,’ Howells told me. He admitted that the hard drive would have been subject to some compaction from being covered in dirt and other debris. But, as complicated as it was, the procedure may not have fractured. the disk nor destroyed its contents.
The 2021 CNN report quoted Howells as saying he wanted to “excavate an express area of the landfill based on a network and hard drive reference formula while meeting all environmental and protection standards. ” The disk will then be presented to knowledge and specialists who will be able to rebuild it from scratch with new parts and try to get the little knowledge you want to access the bitcoins.
Yesterday’s ruling specifies that, according to a report prepared by Howells, “in November 2013, the hard drive ‘probably’ was ‘in an area of approximately 2,000 square meters of the site’ and ‘in an approximate volume of 10,000 to 15,000 tons of tea
“It would be a serious offense for the plaintiff or any user acting on his behalf to sort or disturb any waste deposit on the Site, unless it is lawful to do so through the defendant: see section 27 of the CPA 1974 and section 60 of the Medium Atmosphere . Protection Act of 1990,” the ruling said. “The defendant can only grant such a permit or excavate himself if he first applied for and received a new environmental permit from NRW, because the schedule of activities permitted in his existing permit does not allow excavation of the Array. “
This story was originally published on Ars Technica.
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