Mr Armstrong said the court must be “very, very wary of causing a grave injustice to Mr Howells” by refusing to allow the case to go to a full trial.

“We seek, plainly and candidly, a declaration of rights over the ownership of the Bitcoin,” Mr Armstrong said.

As I’ve commented before, I expect that what a court would find is that Howells owns the Bitcoin, but that this is a different question from whether he owns the drive on which the numbers necessary to access the Bitcoin are stored.

The previous example I gave was that of a piece of paper on which a bank account password was written. It seems very unlikely to me that a court would find that ownership of the account contents is tied to ownership of the paper. I think that:

• It would find that throwing out a piece of paper containing the account password does not transfer ownership of the account’s contents to the landfill.

• But also, that simply having accidentally put something in the trash doesn’t create special ownership rights for me. That is, I cannot compel the landfill to let me go search the landfill for that paper simply because I own the contents of that account.

This is far from the first time that people have regretted accidentally throwing something out after the fact. If one is going to simply claim that the fact that the discarding was inadvertent means that a landfill must let someone go pick through the landfill, I suspect that landfill operation would become impractical. What’s unique about this case is just the high value of the thing that was accidentally thrown out. And I’m dubious that courts are going to decide that someone has the eight to compel searching s landfill based just on the value of something accidentally thrown out.

I’d guess that a more-common scenario is someone owning intellectual property and accidentally throwing out the only physical copy of that intellectual property, like a recording of music that they made. Their intellectual property rights will not be transferred to a landfill or terminate merely because they threw out the only physical copy of a recording of that intellectual property. Throwing it out may make it difficult to actually make use of those intellectual property rights, but they still have those rights. Demonstrating that they have those rights isn’t going to mean that they own the storage media on which the recording lives.