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.
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.
The drive itself wasn’t worth anything. All he needed was the seed phrase.
Making backups of a hard drive (onto other hard drives) in an attempt to preserve you crypto is like day 1 amateur move.
Seed phrases weren’t a thing until 2013
2013 Seed phrase words come from a standardized word list defined by Bitcoin Improvement Proposal #39 (aka BIP39). This proposal was introduced in 2013 to simplify and improve the process of backing up and recovering Bitcoin wallets.