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Judge Ends One Man’s 11-Year Quest to Recover $765 Million in Bitcoin by Digging Up a Landfill


A UK judge ruled against James Howells, who has been trying to get a hard drive with private keys to a cryptocurrency fortune out of a landfill for over a decade.

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. High Court Judge Keyser KC issued his ruling last week, siding with the defendant in Howells v. Newport City Council. The council said that excavating the landfill site would let harmful substances escape into the environment, endangering residents with "potentially serious risks which raises public health issues and environmental concerns," the ruling said.

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