Perhaps there's more in this than he's telling us. Perhaps he's really Satoshi.

Katie the crash-test dummy Pricenstein if he thinks (a) the drive can ever be found, (b) it'll work, and (c) the gov won't find a weasel way to slide out of doing real due dilligance in the matter!

We need a Nelson Muntz icon. Or at least a Popcorn icon.

The council should send him a bill for all their time that he's wasted to date, along with a court order not to bother them again about the matter or else be banned from dealing in crypto assets, as he clearly has an unhealthy obsession with that lost and almost certainly destroyed hard drive.

Not a cat in hells chance that hard drive will work, that data is long gone.

Even if by some miracle, someone finds a hard drive with the matching serial number, platters all rusted and dripping with bin-juice, no doubt there'll be a queue of "data recovery specialists" willing to take the job (hourly rate, paid in advance, of course)

(And here's hoping someone faked the serial number and filled an old hard drive with Rick Astley on loop)

So this guy is trying to hold the council to ransom with legal letters and the promise of 10% of the 'potential' recovery of these fabled bitcoins from a buried HDD which he knowingly threw away. And what if the HDD just isn't there or the data cannot be recovered? Is he going to pay for the all the costs incurred by the council as well as the site remediation costs afterwards? Probably not. He should just accept he didn't pay attention to what he was doing, made a mistake, accept the coins are gone and move on.

I'm surprised the council doesn't just contract Howell's company to do the excavation work, with appropriate charges and penalty clauses.

On the other hand, why should they bother getting involved in a speculative treasure hunt?

I can struggle to find some old data on the few HDD / SSD I have here, and I know where they are.

How will he recongise HIS hdd in a rubbish tip

If he is IT, does he not damage the HDD to make it non useable again before disposing ?

If he is IT, does he not damage the HDD to make it non useable again before disposing ?

This is how I know my coins are long gone. My standard disposal method was drilling 4 holes, giving those a 30s or so spritz with a blow torch, then dropping them into the bit bucket of salt water. Then when that started getting full, yoinking them out, drying them a bit and taking them to the recycling center. WEEE, and gone. Then someone mentioning coins were now 'worth' $500 and a moment of regret.

1. Bitcoin is not money. It is not guaranteed to have a value by any centralised body - yes, I know this is the point of bitcoin, but it's also why it has no value at all to me. At least if I bought tulip bulbs, I'd have pretty flowers when the market crashed.

2. It is not an asset. (It has no intrinsic value - see point 1)

3. Easy come, easy go. If he had that kind of real money in the first place, I doubt he would have invested a significant chunk of it in bitcoin. (i.e. it is likely the money was never real, just numbers. - also see point 1.)

4. We only have his word that the keys to the bitcoin wallet even existed in the first place.

5. It's stupid lawsuits like this that take money way from things councils should be doing.

(Edited to add the following)

6. If he disposed of his IT equipment in line with local council policy, it would have gone to recycling. (i.e. mashed to pieces and any metals of value extracted.)

"It is not guaranteed to have a value by any centralised body"

Thumbs down isn't mine but I'm struggling to think of any fiat currencies that have their "value" guaranteed, as opposed to those on a gold standard. Certainly, I can settle debts with Pound Sterling, if they're issued in Pound Sterling but I have no guarantees about, for example, how many eggs I can buy with it (or anything else with intrinsic value).

At most, the intrinsic value I can think of for normal money is toilet paper, as it is rather easier to wipe with a note than it is with a hard drive.

Perhaps the important bit is that, unlike bitcoin, I can rely upon the authorities to support me putting the screws to someone who owes me currency that said authorities issued.

The intrinsic value is not the paper, it's what it costs to print and distribute it.

This was demonstrated in Somalia following the collapse of central

government. People started printing their own ten shilling note. Eventually

the value fell to a stable point - as above.

I'm not certain I agree that this could be considered the 'intrinsic' value because that would suggest bitcoin has similarly intrinsic value (based on it taking time, energy and expensive equipment to do the calculations).

The Somalia example is interesting.

excavate a garbage dump

Better known as a landfill site, or even better the tip. If a story is about something that's happening in the UK, at least use English terminology, please?

Most local councils in the UK tell you to take your old electronics to the "recycling centre" (aka "the tip") or to drop them off in a skip in a designated location.

If his IT equipment is in landfill, it is likely he's not following local rules on how to dispose of it. (Maybe the council should go after him under IEEE waste disposal laws....)

He provides the money up front for the council to hire an expert company to perform the excavation. All costs for the search, as well as the after effects of the search and clean up are to be paid for by Mr Muppet, sorry Mr Howells. Again up-front.

Failure to provide enough money to cover ALL costs (as decided by the council) leaves Mr Howells, and his backers on the hook for EVERYTHING. That also will obviously include his lawyers, as part of the backing team.

Let's find out just how risk averse you are, Mr Howell. Or more specifically, how risk averse your backers are.

What a muppet...

It's not just the cost of excavation. It's also the cost of going through so many cubic metres of waste looking for a hard-drive. Either that would have to be done by hand, expensive even with cheap labour* or there'd be the cost of designing and building a custom machine for the job.

* Add in the security guards to make sure that if one of the cheap labour found it they didn't pocket it. And then more guards to watch the guards.

You don't have to do it by hand. Just get one of those huge electromagnets they use at the junk yard.

Rofl.

He could probably crowdsource the funding. No shortage of idiots.

... that no sane person would like Newport to look like Dubai or Las Vegas?

Besides that, I think it will cost rather more than $500 million to keep an area of Brittan looking like the desert.

Oh, they're working on turning the UK into a desert.

Since he illegally dumped WEEE in the council's landfill site, he should first be prosecuted for that.

And only then, reminded that the HDD is no longer his property.

I'm pretty sure that once rubbish is collected from your home, it becomes the property of the local authority...

He's suing for damages because he threw something away that he then wanted?

Is there an El Reg reader out there who hasn't done this?

If he wins we need to get together and launch a class-action case for all those RS-232 cables, USB dongles, etc, etc that must be worth squillions if we add it all up.

“Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part”

If I owned a hard drive with the electronic keys to ${BIG_MONEY}, I would label the outside of it with a human-readable label, and store the drive in my safety deposit box.

Wouldn't anyone with a grain of common sense do something like this?

It probably wasn't worth very much when it was first mined, so it seemed relatively meaningless, but by the time it was discarded, that value was probably around $90k US, so upgrading its handling might have been a good idea. Back when I mined a small amount of cryptocurrency to see how it worked, I also didn't treat my wallet IDs with care, meaning I lost my all-time funds with an approximate value of $0.23 US, which would be today [checking...] $0.84 or so. I'm fine with this. If I wasn't, I had lots of options.

The council gives him permission to excavate, on the understanding that all costs related to doing this (including environmental considerations) are met by him. After all, it's a drop in the ocean if he has wank on the harddisc worth hundreds of millions. And if he doesn't, or the drive is rusted and crushed, then, well, then he gets stripped of all of his assets, blacklisted for the huge debt, persona non grata, and has to use the food bank like an ever increasing number of people.

If he's sure enough to try suing the council for stupid money, then he is sure enough to take this risk, right?

If this approach were to be taken, I would expect him to have to put a substantial sum of money into escrow, to guarantee that costs will be covered. (Probably tens of millions, just to be on the safe side. He can afford that I would have thought.... surely anyone with his alleged assets would only put a fraction into something as volatile as bitcoin?)

What, *all* of it is in bitcoin...? Oh well, I guess it's all gone then.

I'm clearly a horder as I'm struggling to figure out why you would throw out a working blank harddrive, which according to the report is what he thought he threw out.

There is a size of working blank hard drive which is low enough for me not to. A 120 GB spinning hard drive with twelve years on the clock, I don't need that. I probably don't need the number of working hard drives I have. They're not SSDs, those are almost all in use. Maybe it was something like that. You only need about 6 kB for a wallet.

Yes, but if you're going to throw it out, you at least take a sledgehammer to it first, right?

Or the less violent and more arty farty approach: Get out your Torx screwdrivers and disassemble it. The platters make nice wind chimes / pigeon deterrents for fruit trees

No; that would be depriving future retro enthusiasts of a valuable resource.

Overwrite it with junk data, or just allow time for details to get out of date (for instance, the only person who can make any use at all of the number of a credit card you held five years ago is a programmer learning to implement the Luhn algorithm). But HDDs are rare enough and fragile enough without assholes deliberately damaging them.

"Newport would look like Dubai"

I do feel for this guy. In his position I'd probably be kicking myself every day at the thought of what could have been. But I think he's got a rather inflated opinion of how far £41m would actually go. It's "only" about 12.5% of the council's annual budget so in the grand scheme, not a huge amount and still a big risk for the council to take.

is what he didn't say, but perhaps he's really Craig Wright and that's the drive he told the Norwegian court that he'd stomped on. Stranger things have happened.

Actually, no, they haven't.

" Howells has filed a claim against Newport City Council for £495,314,800 ($644 million) in damages "

The council aren't responsible for your idiotic disposal of IT equipment, you absolute fuck nugget.

Get a restraining order against this loon for wasting public money

His fuck up is not the councils problem.

I remember reading about crypto when it first came along in a PC Mag. I believe the cover CD even had the software on it. The article described the current value of the coins as being far less than the cost in electricity which put me off from doing what this chap did.

Who do I sue for me not knocking out half a billion quids worth of bitcoins when I had the chance?

The main problem is I'm not American so my legal claim will go as badly as this one will go.