James Howells, a UK-based IT engineer, is currently embroiled in a legal battle with Newport City Council as he seeks approximately $647 million in damages. This comes after the council denied his request to excavate a landfill site where he believes a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoin is discarded. Howell allegedly discarded the drive unknowingly during a household clean-up in 2013, back when the Bitcoin stored amounted to a value of roughly $1.3 million.
Despite multiple efforts to retrieve the lost hard drive from the landfill site, Howell’s requests have, to date, been refused by the council. To counter the council’s resistances, James has gone ahead to assemble a legal team with the lawsuit expected to be heard in the court in December.
Howell has since proposed to the council that he will remit 10% of the value of the recovered Bitcoin should the hard drive be found. However, the council has maintained its stance against the excavation proposal. It has cited environmental concerns bothering on elevated levels of hazardous substances such as asbestos, arsenic, and methane in the landfill site as the primary reason for its refusal.
The ongoing disagreement has resulted in Howell pitching an idea worth $11 million in 2022 to isolate and recover the discarded hard drive, currently believed to be buried under 110,000 tonnes of garbage. His proposition suggests that the execution of the plan would cost the council nothing. Yet, Newport City Council has continued to reject his proposal, questioning the legality and feasibility of his claims.
Meanwhile, crypto experts maintain that it is essential for owners to securely store hardware wallets, back up recovery phrases in multiple secure locations, and keep private keys secure offline to avoid such losses in the future.