In 2013, a British man made the costliest mistake of his life: throwing away a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins. Ten years later, after a fierce legal battle, his dream of fortune vanished for good.
Imagine losing 750 million euros in a simple mistake sorting trash. This is the surreal story of James Howells, who has been fighting for 10 years to recover his digital treasure. Judge Keyser KC has just put an end to this desperate quest, rejecting the Briton’s latest legal attempt to access the Newport landfill where his precious hard drive is located.
This story, which sends shivers down the spine of all cryptocurrency investors, begins in 2013. At the time, Howells made the fatal mistake of confusing two hard drives and threw away the one containing the access key to 8,000 bitcoins. A detail that may seem insignificant in 2013, but which takes on astronomical proportions with the explosion in the price of Bitcoin.
An impossible quest
The technical reality of this research is dizzying: the hard drive would be buried somewhere under 10,000 to 15,000 tons of waste, over an area of 2,000 square meters. Despite proposals including the use of robot dogs and cutting-edge technology, Newport City Council has remained adamant. And for good reason: the environmental risks are considerable.
The judge’s decision is based on several compelling arguments. First, the Pollution Control Act of 1974 states that waste becomes the property of the local authority once deposited. Then, James Howells missed the six-year legal deadline to file his claim. Finally, the environmental and health risks far outweigh the almost zero chances of success of the operation.
He had even considered sharing profits with the local community to help them.
In a last hope, James Howells clung to a technical detail: the hard drive would be protected by an anti-corrosion coating which could have preserved it from hostile conditions. A hypothesis which will now remain at the state of theory, since justice has definitively closed the door to any attempt at excavation.
The future of cryptos
The story of James Howells is only the tip of a much more worrying iceberg for the future of cryptocurrencies.
According to several studies, between 3 and 4 million bitcoins are already considered “lost forever”, either through forgetting the private keys or following the death of their owners.
With the aging of the first generation of investors in cryptocurrencies, this problem is likely to increase considerably in the years to come.
The transmission of crypto-assets requires careful planning: unlike traditional bank accounts, a traditional will is not enough to transfer bitcoins to one’s heirs. Without the private key or specific instructions on how to access it, the digital fortune can disappear forever with its owner.
Several solutions are emerging, such as “digital safes” or “crypto wills”, but they are still little used by the community.
