UK Man Sues City Over Discarded Bitcoin-filled Hard Drive
Booga1 writes:
Wales Online reports: James Howells has spent more than a decade trying to get back a dumped hard drive. Now he has assembled a team of top lawyers to sue the council he claims has 'ignored' him "I'm suing the council for 495m because they won't give me back my bin bag."
A man has filed a court claim against Newport council in a "last resort" to get back almost half a billion pounds' worth of Bitcoin. A mix-up saw James Howells' hard drive dumped at a recycling centre in 2013 causing him to lose access to cryptocurrency coins which have since rocketed in value.
WalesOnline has seen a court document that says Mr Howells, 39, is suing the council for 495,314,800 in damages, which was the peak valuation of his 8,000 Bitcoins from earlier this year. But he told us this is not a reflection of "what is really going on" and the point is to "leverage" the council into agreeing to an excavation of its landfill to avoid a legal battle. Mr Howells says he has assembled a team of experts who would carry out the 10million dig at no cost to the council. He is also offering the council 10% of the coins' value if recovered.
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The hard drive disaster unfolded after a miscommunication between the IT engineer and his then-partner. Mr Howells, who learned about Bitcoin in 2009 by spending time on IT forums, believes he was one of the very first miners of the cryptocurrency. In basic terms he created the 8,000 coins himself and they cost him nothing beyond pennies' worth of electricity to run his laptop. He stored the private key needed to access the coins on a 2.5in hard drive which he put in a drawer at his home office.
In August 2013 he had a clearout of equipment. Looking through his drawers he came across two hard drives of the same size. One contained the Bitcoin data while the other was blank. Mistakenly he put the Bitcoin one into a black bin liner. When he went to bed that evening he asked his then-partner if after the school run the next morning she would take that bin bag and another one to Newport household waste recycling centre. "His partner refused and stated that she did not wish to do that," write Mr Howells' team of barristers in the claim.
The claim says Mr Howells was "not overly concerned" by her refusal because he had made a mental note to double-check if he had put the right hard drive in the bin bag. But when he woke at 9am his partner had already returned from the school run and had taken the bin bags to the tip. Mr Howells' lost Bitcoins were worth less than 1m at the time but within three months they had soared to a value of 9m. One day they could be worth billions, Mr Howells believes, citing predictions from asset management firm VanEck.
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Newport council sent us a statement hitting back at the "weak" court claim and the criticism over its environmental breaches. Its spokesman said: "The council has told Mr Howells multiple times that excavation is not possible under our environmental permit and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area. The council is the only body authorised to carry out operations on the site.
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