Welsh Judge Dismisses IT Engineer's Legal Attempt to Recover $770M Bitcoin Hard Drive from Landfill

An IT engineer in the United Kingdom has failed in his legal bid to retrieve a hard drive containing $770 million in Bitcoin (BTC) from a landfill in Newport.

James Howells, the engineer, had filed a claim against the city council, seeking permission to excavate the landfill in search of the drive, which reportedly holds 8,000 BTC that he mined in 2009. At the time, each Bitcoin was valued at $13.

According to a BBC report on January 9, Judge Keyser KC, the Circuit Commercial Judge for Wales, dismissed Howells’ case, stating that it had “no realistic prospect” of succeeding if it were to proceed to a full trial.

“The case being struck out at the earliest hearing doesn't even give me the opportunity to explain myself or an opportunity for justice in any shape or form,” Howells said in reaction to the decision. “There was so much more that could have been explained in a full trial and that's what I was expecting.”

Howells asserts that his partner accidentally threw away the hard drive in 2013, and he has been attempting to retrieve it ever since. He has made numerous requests to the Newport City Council for permission to search the site, which have been consistently denied.

The council maintains that once the hard drive entered the landfill, existing laws transferred its ownership to the council. Additionally, the council's environmental permits prohibit any excavation of the site to search for the drive.

James Goudie KC, who represents the council, argued that Howells' offer to donate 10% of the Bitcoin to the local community was essentially encouraging the council to “play fast and loose” by “signing up for a share of the action.”

The landfill contains over 1.4 million tonnes of waste, but Howells claims to have pinpointed the location of the hard drive to a section containing 100,000 tonnes. Despite this, the council stated that on October 11, 2024, it had informed Howells multiple times that excavation was not permitted under its environmental permit due to the significant negative impact it would have on the surrounding area.

However, Howells has accused the council of breaching environmental regulations, asserting that he possesses “100 independently verified pieces of evidence” to back his claims. He alleges that the council has been violating its landfill permit by allowing arsenic, asbestos, ammonium nitrate, and methane gases to leak into the surrounding environment.

The James Howells case gained more attention in 2024 after Bitcoin's historic rise to $100,000, which saw the cryptocurrency generate over 130% in yearly returns. The IT engineer speculated that the Bitcoin on his hard drive could be worth £1 billion, or around $1.21 billion, by next year.