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.
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.
Yeah there’s that guy on YT who does this shit for a living and it’s insanely impressive. The one I remember, they pulled a Ledger out of a lake, did all sorts of crazy hardware hacking to get the pw to unlock it, only to find that it was basically empty. The guy had forgotten what his actual balance was, and he was off by several orders of magnitude. Shit was brutal…
But yeah, the hacking itself was incredible, and when there is the possibility of that much money, people are willing to work their ass off for a piece of it.
How much does an electron microscope cost?