A man trying to recover a hard drive containing $750 million of bitcoin from a landfill just had his latest bid rejected
Darren Britton / Wales News
- James Howells discarded a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins in 2013.
- He has been fighting for access to a local landfill to search for it for a decade.
- This week, a judge struck down his latest attempt to search for the bitcoin, worth over $750 million.
A British man's yearslong attempts to find a hard drive containing around $750 million of bitcoin in a landfill site have been hit with a fresh setback.
James Howells, 39, launched a legal bid to force Newport City Council in southern Wales to let him search the local dump where he believes the fortune is located. This week, a judge rejected that bid.
"I consider that the particulars of the claim do not show any reasonable grounds for bringing this case," Judge Keyser KC said Thursday.
Howells says that in 2013, he accidentally discarded a laptop hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins in a garbage bag, which ended up at the landfill site. He says he mistook the hard drive for another identical drive he owned, which was blank.
As of Saturday morning, bitcoin's value is roughly $94,600, putting the value of the cryptocurrency on the hard drive at around $757 million.
For the past decade, Howells has been trying to gain access to the dump to relocate the hard drive. He has repeatedly asked Newport City Council if he can enter and offered to give it a share of the cryptocurrency if it was found.
Howells previously told Business Insider he thought it was achievable to search the 110,000 tons of garbage through a combination of human sorters, robot dogs, and an artificial-intelligence-powered machine trained to look for hard drives on a conveyor belt.
In his attempts to regain the bitcoin, which he mined in 2009, Howells sought to sue the council to gain the legal right to access the site or to get £495 million ($608 million) in compensation.
However, Judge Keyser KC ruled in the council's favor on Thursday, striking out Howells' claim.
The judge accepted the council's argument that existing laws meant the hard drive became the property of the council once it entered the landfill site.
"I also consider that the claim would have no realistic prospect of succeeding if it went to trial and that there is no other compelling reason why it should be disposed of at trial."
Howells told crypto outlet BraveNewCoin that he was disappointed by the judge's decision.
"I'm disappointed they wouldn't let me proceed to trial, but I was encouraged when the judge said that the council might own the physical hard drive, but I am still the owner of the bitcoin," Howells said.
"Until a higher court tells me no, I'll keep on fighting," he said. "Even if I never physically recover those bitcoins, I'll find a way to make something of them."