A British judge ruled against a man who wants to excavate a landfill where he says a hard drive with access to thousands of bitcoins was mistakenly dumped over 11 years ago.
Since 2013, James Howells has been hoping to recover a laptop hard drive that he says contains the private key for cryptocurrency which he says he mined in 2009. Ars wrote about it at the time, noting that the value of a bitcoin had just passed $1,000, making 7,500 bitcoins worth $7.5 million.
The alleged number of bitcoins has changed a bit, with Howells now saying he lost 8,000 bitcoins. The bitcoin price exceeded $100,000 last month and was $95,636 as of last Friday, or $765 million for 8,000 bitcoins.
High Court judge Keyser KC issued his ruling last week, siding with the defendant in Howells v. Newport City Council. Howells has no realistic chance of success at trial, the judge ruled. Howells sought “an order…
