Brit Bitcoin miner weighs buying landfill to recover $768m

James Howlls plans to buy a public discharge where he claims that a massive bitcoin fortune could be buried, but local authorities plan to close the site after a legal battle.

Despite a dismissal of the court last month, the first Bitcoin (BTC) Miner James Howlls plans to buy the discharge where he thinks that his lost cryptocurrency, worth more than 620 million pounds sterling ($ 768 million), is buried.

The Newport resident in the south of Wales, asked for a court order to dig the site or receive $ 609 million in compensation from the Newport Municipal Council.

Howlls’ complaint revolves around a hard drive that his former partner would have rejected in 2013 in the landfill. The apparatus would contain 7,500 BTC, which Howlls extracted in 2009 when Bitcoin was new and exchanged for simple sous.

The computer engineer asked several times or heard Newport authorities to access the site, offering the council for a share of fortune in return. The discharge contains more than 1.4 million tonnes of waste, but Howlls says that his training is probably buried in an area of ​​100,000 tonnes, citing a survey by a team he hired.

In response, the Newport Municipal Council asked the High Court to reject Howlls’ complaints, arguing that local laws grant the rights of the government on all the goods entering the discharge. Judge Andrew John Keyser KC judge Against Howlls, declaring that his claims were insufficient and that too much time had passed.

The authorities also plan to close the site during the year 2025-2026 and to convert sections to solar farm.

Howlls expressed his shock to the BBC when he heard the news: “Especially since he told the High Court than the closure of the discharge to allow me to search would have a huge detrimental impact on the inhabitants of Newport”, he said.

According to the reportHowlls plans to climb the case at the Supreme Court and did not exclude the purchase of the discharge. He thinks that lost funds could reach an evaluation of $ 1.2 billion by 2026 if Bitcoin continues its upward trend.