Старий HDD з ноутбука / Glen Carrie, Unsplash
It seems that the long saga of the HDD with 7500 bitcoins is coming to an end. The court denied the owner of the $700 million drive permission to search a landfill in Wales.
The owner of the hard drive, which ended up in a landfill with 7500 bitcoins now worth about $700 million, has not stopped searching for them for 12 years. We last wrote about the adventures of James Howells in October last year, when with the support of a consortium of investors he created, decided to sue the city, “because they are not returning my trash bag”. However, the High Court of England and Wales denied him the possibility of conducting search operations at the Newport city landfill.
On Thursday, January 9, the High Court ruled that Howells’ case had no reasonable chance of success in court. The court sided with the city council and dismissed the lawsuit, under which he hoped to gain access to the landfill for excavations or receive £495,314,800 from the city authorities as compensation.
Mr. Howells’ misfortune with the lost bitcoins began in August 2013. He discovered that his girlfriend had thrown out an old laptop hard drive with a bitcoin wallet, which he had mined back in 2009. However, Howells later confessed that he himself had thrown the device away.
According to UK law, anything that ends up in the garbage collected by the city becomes its property. Secondly, Howells’ case does not meet the six-year limitation period established by the UK. Although the lost bitcoins were known about in 2013, Howells decided to sue the city only in 2024.
BBC published Howells’ comments after the court decision. he says he is very upset by this decision. The plaintiff’s arguments did not effectively contest the city’s ownership rule, but contained objections regarding the limitation period. The unsuccessful owner of a huge fortune says he “tried to interact with the Newport city council in every humanly possible way over the past 12 years”. In particular, he offered the city 10% of the value of the bitcoins.
The HDD rescue consortium estimated an 80% probability of data recovery. Howells and partners were ready to spend about $13 million on a search project that would last three years.
Source: Tom`s Hardware