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A Welsh father of three appealed after a ruling rejected his attempt to force his council to allow him to dig up a hard drive containing a passcode to his lost Bitcoin fortune. James Howells, of Newport, is on a new legal team and vowed he “never gave up” when channeling Scottish warrior William “Braveheart” Wallace.
The 39-year-old, who learned about Bitcoin in 2009 through spending time on web forums, believes he is one of the first miners of the cryptocurrency. He created 8,000 parts, which charge him almost nothing and stored the necessary personal key. To access them on a 2. 5-inch hard drive in a drawer in your home office. But in 2013, her then-partner mistakenly threw away the hard drive.
The value of the coins has since rocketed to around £683million — reaching record highs in recent days ahead of what President Donald Trump has promised will be a crypto-friendly US administration — while Mr Howells has spent 12 years desperately trying to get the hard drive back from the Docksway landfill site where it is buried. He took Newport council to the High Court in a “last resort” attempt to force an excavation but earlier this month the claim was thrown out by Judge Keyser KC, who said it would have “no realistic prospect” of success at trial.
Despite his claim’s failure, Mr Howells initially saw reasons for optimism. His impression of the judge’s position during the hearing was that “the council owned the physical hard drive but that I am the owner of the Bitcoin”. And while the judgment left him feeling resigned that the dig would never happen, he still believed he could “tokenise” his inaccessible coins into a “child currency”, the value of which would be derived from Bitcoin. All he needed to create this sub-currency, he felt, was a declaration from the judge that he owned the Bitcoin.
However, that dream suffered a severe blow when the judgment issued its final order and did not involve such a declaration of ownership. Howells has had 21 days to appeal the ruling and has already filed the documents. But it is looking for new lawyers, after parting ways with its original team. Their replacements would be presented with the same deal: no cash upfront but a percentage of the profits if M. Howells was successful.
Mr Howells told WalesOnline: “It’s kind of like a Braveheart situation at the moment. Quite literally, the nobles and the lords have run for the hills, and I’m left without a legal team. I’m fighting on my own. I don’t blame them [the ex-lawyers] but I will never surrender, never give up. The Braveheart analogy is very apt for how I feel.”
He thinks that it would not be “skin skin” of the court or advice so that the final order of the order saw with a declaration of its property. “The Council agreed that there is no problem, as long as I agreed to avoid fighting for the search , and I thank you for that, “he said. ” This moment.
What is his evidence that he possesses Bitcoin? “We have Blockchain wallet data, which are visual for anyone. Anyone can see that there are 8,000 coins in this balance, created in February, March and April 2009, which I have still affirmed at night.
Speaking of their previous legal team, he said: “We separate. I don’t have a bad word to say about them. They did a very intelligent task, but unfortunately it was not enough. Now I will have to recruit another.
In a past interview with Walesonline, Mr. Howells used an analogy to assistance his tokenization plan, which he admits to having been a tricky concept for some people. “In the past, the gold bars would be held in a secure and the tickets negotiated in public would constitute the price held in the trunk This is called James Coin – which would reproduce one for one of the assets in the Bitcoin portfolio.
“Everyone can see that Bitcoin will never move. I can’t get the personal key, so it will stay there for eternity. But I think with a legal declaration of ownership, I can transform them into a sub-sholes. would decrease.
He added that his inability to access Bitcoin would not be an impediment to those ambitions. “It’s not an obstacle, it’s an advantage. The clearance acts like a super dumb safe. The coins never leave the safe. It would allow me to do other things besides sitting there and taking a look at the Bitcoin that I have. cannot access.
Howells has spent the last decade considering the unit as “a full-time operation. “He left his IT task and made a deal with investors who would have noticed him with around 30% of Bitcoin if the unit had been found. You can read more about the failure of M’s initial claim. Howells here and more on his backstory here.
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