Bitcoin hard drive🗑️: UK court denies man's bid to search landfill for device containing his fortune

A man's bid to search a dumpsite for a hard drive containing his lost cryptocurrency fortune has been denied by a UK court.

James Howells launched legal action against Newport city council in south Wales, seeking permission to scour a landfill for a lost hard drive containing a vast sum of bitcoin.

The computer expert had about $700 million in his bitcoin wallet, which was safely stored on a hard drive until 2013, when the device and his fortune ended up in the dump.

The 39-year-old said he had placed the precious cargo in a black bag during an office spring clean and left it in the hallway of his home.

It is believed his then partner mistook the bag for trash and took it to the dump, where she disposed of it.

Mr Howells discovered the catastrophic error and spent over 10 years pleading with his local authority to help him retrieve it, even offering to share 25 percent of its astronomical sum if the council permitted him to dig it out.

“I had two identical hard drives and I threw out the wrong one,” Mr Howells told The Guardian in 2021. "I have to laugh about it now.”

He maintained that the search would not be a 'needle in a haystack' scenario, as trash bins were assigned serial numbers and buried in the landfill with a grid reference.

Mr Howells and his lawyers said this enabled him to pinpoint roughly where the hard drive was buried, and expert excavators could then extract it.

“If I could access the landfill records, I could identify the week that I threw the hard drive away, identify the serial number of the bin it was in, and identify where the grid reference is located,” he said.

Mr Howells even secured financial backing from a hedge fund to cover the search costs, so the council would not have to use any public funds.

However, Newport city council has consistently denied his requests, stating that an excavation of the site would violate licensing regulations and cause environmental damage.

Now, Mr Howells' decade-long quest to salvage the hard drive, which he said has a 'good chance' of still functioning, has been thwarted by a high court judge, who ruled in the council's favor to strike out the claim, according to The Guardian.

At a hearing on Thursday, Judge Keyser KC stated that there were 'no reasonable grounds' for bringing the claim and that Mr Howells had 'no realistic prospect of succeeding' if the case proceeded to trial.

James Goudie KC, representing the council, argued that the hard drive became the council's property when it entered the dump and that environmental permits prohibited any excavations of the site.

The judge said he agreed with this argument and that Mr Howells was not entitled to retrieve the hard drive.

Mr Howells has speculated that by 2026, the bitcoins on his missing hard drive could reach the billion mark, and he vowed to pursue his case in the supreme court.

Reacting to the decision, Mr Howells said he was 'very upset,' according to BBC News.

"This ruling has taken everything from me and left me with nothing. It's the great British injustice system striking again," he added.