Summary
A UK judge has dismissed James Howells’ legal attempt to excavate a Newport landfill to recover a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins, now valued at $765 million.
The court ruled against Howells due to environmental risks, ownership laws favoring the landfill authority, and a statute of limitations barring the claim.
Howells accidentally disposed of the drive in 2013, sparking his long battle to retrieve it.
He criticized the decision as unjust, while the council maintained excavation would endanger public health and breach regulations.
Howells, did not accidentally dispose of it.
His Ex tossed it out with the rest of his junk.
And if Howells had followed common self custody advice, he’d have had his seed phrase written down somewhere safe so he could recover his wallet and BTC to any other hard drive.
that too.
Basically… I’m surprised it took this long for the courts to tell him “Don’t be stupid next time, 'kay?” in that tone of voice people usually reserve for small children and puppies.
that’s one hell of an idiot tax, though.
Your comment reminds me of this Netflix documentary.
11 years in a landfill that drive would not be recoverable anymore even if you pulled the individual plates from the drive out.
I think you’d be surprised what a drive recovery company can restore. I’ve seen drives come out of an office that burned to the ground that could be recovered.
Agreed. You don’t need to recover a working bootable partition, you just need to identify a few files with a very specific profile. It’s probably doable.
But finding that drive this many years later… Give up.
Whatever steps he could have taken to prevent it from happening (I’m not super familiar with crypto self management) aside, this still sucks for him. If I knew I had generational wealth right beyond my finger tips, I’d be obsessed too.
The drive was thrown out by his GF by mistake but at the time it was valued at 500k.
I can understand not having a lot of backups early on, but by the time it’s worth 500k, having it only on one hard drive was pretty negligent.
There are so many ways to back it up.
Right? I’d drive me insane only for my search to be a waste.
The funny thing is, back in 2013, if he had spent his time, effort and money just buying more Bitcoin to replace the Bitcoin he lost, then he’d still be a multi-millionaire today.
That’s what should really bother him. When he realized his mistake, he still made the wrong move.
