Judge ends man’s 11-year quest to dig up landfill and recover $765M in bitcoin
Judge ends man’s 11-year quest to dig up landfill and recover $765M in bitcoin
Hard drive that could provide access to 8,000 bitcoins is buried at the dump.
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.
Howells, did not accidentally dispose of it.
His Ex tossed it out with the rest of his junk.
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, ...
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.
If I had 500k (Value when it was chucked) in my possession, I’d be very fucking careful with 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.
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?
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
thanks for posting
Right? I'd drive me insane only for my search to be a waste.
The funny thing is, back in 2013, if he had spent his time, effort and money just buying more Bitcoin to replace the Bitcoin he lost, then he'd still be a multi-millionaire today.
That's what should really bother him. When he realized his mistake, he still made the wrong move.
Not to mention how much he must have spent on his lawsuit. It's an embodiment of the sunk cost fallacy.
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.
Even if they found it what are the chances they could get any data from it after 11 years exposed to the elements? Wales is not a dry place. It will be fucked.
There's loads of people lamenting the loss of crypto coins that they spent on a pizza back when they were worth pennies, or lost to a dead HDD. I worked with a guy who claimed he had £2 million of it on a dead drive and he was going to have it recovered, but the fact that he wore the same reeking tobacco covered jumper every day indicated that was a lie.
Holy moly, that's a whole Juan Soto down the drain.