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James Howells, a UK man whose former partner dumped his Bitcoin hard drive worth about £598 million (R13.95 billion), has had his attempt to sue a council to recover the hard drive from a landfill thrown out of court, BBC News reports.
Judge Keyser KC struck off the case from the roll. Howells had attempted to sue to access the landfill or receive £495 million (R11.55 billion) in compensation.
The hard drive containing a Bitcoin wallet was dumped in 2013. However, the judge found no reasonable grounds for the claim and that it likely wouldn’t succeed at a full trial.
Howells said he was “very upset” with the outcome. He said having the case thrown out at the first hearing meant he had no opportunity to explain his story or “for justice in any shape or form”.
He added that he had attempted to engage with the Newport City Council extensively over the past 12 years.
“It’s not about greed, I’m happy to share the proceeds but nobody in a position of power will have a decent conversation with me,” BBC News quoted Howells as saying.
Howells was an early adopter and miner of Bitcoin. He mined the cryptocurrency in his lost wallet in 2009 before forgetting about it and his partner throwing it out.
Seeing the surge in the value of the missing digital wallet last year, he formed a group of experts to attempt to recover and access the lost hard drive.
Howells estimates the wallet’s value, containing 7,500 Bitcoin, at £598 million (R13.95 billion) and that it could grow to £819 million (R19.11 billion) in 2025.
He said he had asked for permission to access the site multiple times and offered the council a 10% share of the lost Bitcoin if he could recover it.
Bitcoin’s value grew by over 80% in 2024.
While the landfill holds over 1.4 million tonnes of waste, Howells said he had narrowed the hard drive’s location to a spot holding 100,000 tonnes.
However, the council’s legal counsel, James Goudie KC, said existing laws meant the hard drive had become the council’s property when it entered the dump site.
He added that environmental permits would forbid any attempt to dig up the landfill in search of the hard drive.
Although the fortune was significantly smaller, an electronic engineer from Pretoria shared his story of lost bitcoin with MyBroadband in August 2021.
He mined 20 Bitcoins using a gaming PC he built roughly 14 years ago when the cryptocurrency was worth just a few cents.
A tech-savvy teenager, he started mining the cryptocurrency while in Grade 7 after reading about it online.
“I believe I used the original Bitcoin wallet software, which required a wallet key and password to access,” he said.
He recalled using one of the first command-line miners available for Nvidia GPUs.
“I don’t remember exactly how long I mined for, but it was for a few weeks to a couple of months continuously,” he said.
He mined Around 20 billion using the setup. That year, Bitcoin’s value climbed from $0.0008 to $0.08.
After losing interest in the project, he eventually lost the key and password for his Bitcoin wallet.
The Bitcoin he mined would be worth almost R37 million at today’s prices.
SOURCE:Man loses fight to search for lost R14-billion Bitcoin wallet – MyBroadband
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