British man James Howells is suing the local city council after he mistakenly threw away a hard drive containing 7,500 Bitcoins (worth more than $700 million). He has repeatedly requested to dig up a garbage dump over the past 10 years but was repeatedly refused. However, the lawsuit has now been dismissed by the UK High Court.
According to James Howells, he obtained these Bitcoins through mining in 2009. Unexpectedly, when he was cleaning at home in 2013, he mistakenly put the hard drive containing Bitcoins into a black garbage bag. My partner discarded it at the time, and the garbage bag was eventually sent to a recycling center.
James Howells has been trying to retrieve the hard drive from a local landfill for the past 10 years. His repeated requests to dig up the landfill have been rejected by Newport City Council, despite a promise that if it can be found, it will be recovered. If the hard drive is returned, 10% of the value of the Bitcoins held will be given to the city council, but the city council still opposes the request for excavation, citing environmental concerns.
Desperate, James Howells launched a lawsuit against Newport City Council in October last year, demanding that he be allowed to dig at the landfill or be paid £495 million (about $609 million) in compensation.
At a hearing in December, Newport City Council asked the High Court to dismiss the case, arguing that under current law the hard drive would be considered "public property" once it went to landfill and was specifically prohibited by environmental licensing regulations. Excavation at a burial site.
According to the (BBC) report, British High Court Judge Andrew John Keyser KC pointed out in a written judgment on Thursday that the lawsuit "lacked a reasonable legal basis" and that even if the case entered the trial stage, there was "no possibility of winning". There were no other grounds sufficient to persuade the court to proceed further, so the decision was dismissed.
James Howells has optimistically predicted that this "sleeping wealth" may rise to 1 billion pounds (about 1.2 billion U.S. dollars) by 2026. He has also threatened that even if he needs to appeal the case to the British Supreme Court, he will not look back.
"7,500 Bitcoins were mistakenly thrown away as garbage! A British man's plan to "excavate a landfill" was rejected by the court." This article was first published on (Block Guest).
