A resident of the British city of Newport, James Howells, managed to become a celebrity thanks to an incident with an erroneously thrown away hard drive on which about 7.5 thousand bitcoins were stored. For several years he attempted to find the discarded disk in a landfill, but this activity was contrary to local environmental legislation, and the court recently completely banned it.
Image Source: Unsplash, Dhiyo Nugraha
Howells reportedly decided to sue Newport City Council in 2023 to either allow him to continue searching for the hard drive at a local landfill or pay monetary compensation equivalent to the amount lost due to negligence. Since 2009, Howells has been mining Bitcoin, and by 2013 he had accumulated about 7,500 coins, which at the current exchange rate are worth about $700 million. The laptop on which the cryptocurrency was stored was accidentally filled with lemonade; during repairs, the owner removed the hard drive, but then… mistakenly threw away his place of the same one, which he really didn’t need.
The Newport landfill contains around 1.4 million tonnes of rubbish, but Howells says he has been able to pinpoint the suspected location of the discarded hard drive. If measures to find it were implemented, no more than 100 thousand tons of garbage would have to be sorted out. The Briton even tried to offer the city council compensation in the amount of 10% of the amount he planned to earn after restoring access to the lost cryptocurrency and its sale. A court recently ruled that the hard drive became the property of its owners once it entered the landfill, and therefore Howells cannot claim its return. Secondly, environmental legislation prohibits excavations at landfills. Now the unlucky miner has no legal prospects left to bring his case to a favorable outcome.