Weird ass story… I’m not certain why the local government is refusing to permit the recovery operation when they have no financial liability in it. I normally like to ignore everything crypto folks say but this seems pretty reasonable.

I could have sworn that this story has done the rounds already. I guess it’s an update on that story as he has now resorted to litigation.

Lawyers for the council have argued it now legally owns the hard drive because it was dumped at the tip. But Mr Howells’ barristers, Dean Armstrong KC, Maria Mulla, and Bruce Drummond, have denied this on the basis that he never intended to abandon the hard drive or the intellectual property on it.

Hmm.

I don’t know if ownership of the hard drive is actually a relevant issue.

Like, I can believe that the landfill owns the hard drive.

But nobody cares about the hard drive. It’s maybe $200 or so.

What they care about is the Bitcoin elsewhere, and that the contents have a key that gives one access to that Bitcoin. And while I’m not going to dig up case law, I am confident that there is no way that throwing out storage media containing some sort of access key grants ownership of the contents of an account to which the access key on the storage media grants access.

Like, you can’t say “you threw out a piece of paper with your bank account password on it, so now the local landfill owns the contents of your bank account”.