An early Bitcoin adopter has failed in his attempt to get permission to try and recover a missing hard drive from a Newport rubbish tip.
James Howells mined the Bitcoin back in 2009, the early days of cryptocurrency, but lost a hard drive containing a Bitcoin wallet worth about £598m when it was mistakenly thrown away (by a former partner) in 2013. He sought to recover the hard drive from a landfill site but Newport City Council denied access.
Howells sued the council for access or £495m in compensation, but a High Court judge dismissed the case, stating it had no reasonable grounds or realistic prospect of success. Howells argued that he had tried to engage with the council for years and was willing to share the proceeds, but the council maintained that existing laws and environmental permits prohibited the excavation. Howells speculated that the value of the Bitcoin could reach £1bn by next year.
Howells had offered to give 10% of any recovered Bitcoin to the local community, if he was allowed to retrieve it. He was also hoping to make his job of finding the hard drive easier by identifying an area of “just” 100,000 tonnes of waste, amongst the 1.4m tonnes of rubbish at the site.
So is there still a vast Bitcoin fortune sitting covered in rubbish in a Welsh tip? Given the nature of Bitcoin, even if the hard drive had been found in the 12 years since it was thrown out, it’s unlikely anyone else would be able to cash it in.