Man is suing council for £495 million because they won't let him dig up his lost Bitcoin hard drive
Many of us have had the fantasy of going back in time and telling our former selves to buy a few Bitcoin when they were dirt cheap and selling them now they're really expensive.
You'd be very rich indeed if you'd done that, but imagine if you'd actually got loads of Bitcoin and they'd accidentally been thrown away.
A bloke who amassed a fortune in Bitcoin is currently suing his local council in a bid to get it back after he accidentally threw out the hard drive which he stored them on over 10 years ago.
James Howells, 39, is set to head for court later this year as he believes he has 'pinpointed' the exact spot where his lost bin bag containing a fortune in cryptocurrency is and he wants to get it back.
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He accidentally put the hard drive with a bunch of Bitcoin in a black bin bag while having an office clear-out and his partner mistook it for a rubbish bag, so she took it down to the tip where it has been ever since.
Quickly realising his mistake, James has repeatedly asked Newport City Council if he can dig his hard drive out of the landfill site it was dumped in but they have repeatedly said no.
Now he's lodged a writ of £495,314,800 to retrieve the hard drive from the landfill site, and is being backed by a team of wealthy investors
James says there were around 8,000 Bitcoin on the hard drive and since they were accidentally chucked out the value of the cryptocurrency has skyrocketed.
At time of writing one Bitcoin is worth about £50,000, so if the contents of the hard drive remain intact they'd have an eye watering value of around £400 million.
His legal team is suing the council and the matter is set to end up in court in December.
The 39-year-old even hired the council's former head of landfill to help him track down exactly where the hard drive is, and is now sure it's within the 'Cell 2 - Area 2' section of Newport's Docksway Landfill.
He said: "It is what it is. I could spend the rest of my life working nine-to-five and thinking about it every day. I might as well spend my time trying to recover this simple piece of metal.
"Until the courts tells me 'N-O spells no', I'm going to keep going. Obviously my finances are not in the best position at the moment.
"I'm focusing all my current efforts and resources, including money, on the recovery project. I struggle along in the meantime.
"But the legal effort is covered. We're willing to go all the way to the appeals court, the Supreme Court. With a case of this magnitude I'm expecting to go the full distance. I didn't really want to go to court but this is the final shot."
A spokesperson for Newport City Council explained that they couldn't let James dig up their excavation site due to the environmental impact it would have, and that they are 'vigorously resisting' his 'fundamentally weak claim'.
They 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.
"The council follows a strict monitoring and reporting regime for all environmental parameters, which we report on frequently to the regulator.
"In common with other waste disposal authorities, exceedances of some of the levels do occur from time to time and these are logged in Natural Resources Wales’ compliance reports.
"Our monitoring and reporting regime is not related to Mr Howells’ claim and we believe the mention of it is nothing more than an attempt to draw attention away from a fundamentally weak claim which we are vigorously resisting.
"Yet again responding to Mr Howells’ baseless claims are costing the council and Newport taxpayers time and money which could be better spent on delivering services."
Topics: UK News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Money, Technology
Joe Harker