A resident of the British city of Newport, James Howells, managed to become a celebrity thanks to an incident with a mistakenly discarded hard drive, on which about 7.5 thousand bitcoins were stored. For several years, he tried to find the discarded drive in a landfill, but this activity is contrary to local environmental legislation and was recently banned by the court completely.
It is reported that Howells has decided to sue the Newport city council in 2023 to allow him to either continue searching for the hard drive in the local landfill or pay monetary compensation equivalent to the amount lost due to negligence. Howells has been mining bitcoins since 2009 and by 2013 had accumulated about 7,500, which at the current exchange rate are worth about $ 700 million.
The owner removed the hard drive by mistake and then threw it away, thinking that it was another hard drive that he did not need. The landfill in Newport contains about 1.4 million tons of garbage, but Howells says that he was able to determine the probable location of the discarded hard drive. If measures are taken to find it, no more than 100 thousand tons of garbage will have to be sorted.
The Briton even tried to offer the city council compensation in the amount of 10% of the amount that he planned to earn after restoring access to the lost cryptocurrency and selling it. However, the court recently ruled that the hard drive became the property of the landfill owners once it entered the landfill, and therefore Howells cannot demand its return.
Second, environmental legislation prohibits excavation of landfills. Now the unfortunate and already poor "miner" has no legal prospects of bringing his case to a favorable outcome.