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.
Get rekt
Why, wont you be crying yourself to sleep everynight if you know literal life changing money that is rightfully yours was stuck in a landfill somewhere and you cant do anything about it
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.
How much does an electron microscope cost?
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.
Backups. Its not hard.
It’s almost impossible after the fact though!
No way
Howells, did not accidentally dispose of it.
His Ex tossed it out with the rest of his junk.
If I had 500k (Value when it was chucked) in my possession, I’d be very fucking careful with it.
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.
He lost the coins in 2013. So, he probably got them earlier than 2013.
Seed phrases were not originally part of Bitcoin. They came with Bitcoin improvement proposal 39 in 2013.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki
Back then, the options were more limited. But there were options, e.g. making a backup, writing down the private key on paper, …
Still backup your wallet file every 100 transactions.
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.
Similar shit happened to a lot of us, and back then there were no seed phrases. Only wallet files
Yup, I still have a few bitcoins from like 2010 that died with an old hdd.
Your comment reminds me of this Netflix documentary.
There’s gonna be a Goonie’s style movie about this in a few years…
Oh, hell yeah! And there will be some new ghoulish goliath like Sloth, but more akin to the Toxic Avenger, who dwells within the trash warrens and helps the protagonists thwart the bad guys.
Holy moly, that’s a whole Juan Soto down the drain.
