Appeals Court Rejects Claim for a Hard Drive Allegedly Holding 3,443 BTC
The Eleventh Circuit held that Michael Prime’s long-delayed claim for an external hard drive allegedly containing keys to nearly 3,443 BTC was barred by laches. The court did not decide whether the bitcoin actually existed.
On November 4, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the denial of Michael Prime’s effort to recover an external hard drive that he said contained the cryptographic keys to nearly 3,443 bitcoin. Prime argued that the government had seized the drive during a fraud investigation and later destroyed it, leaving him unable to access bitcoin then worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The court focused on Prime’s delay and his earlier statements, not on resolving ownership of the claimed bitcoin. It noted that he had repeatedly represented that he owned very little bitcoin and did not timely identify the orange hard drive as containing valuable keys. By the time he made the claim, the government said the device had been destroyed. The court held that the equitable doctrine of laches barred relief because the delay was inexcusable and prejudiced the government.
The decision became a distinctive Bitcoin legal and human-interest episode because access to the claimed asset depended entirely on a physical device and its private-key material. The court expressly declined to determine whether the nearly 3,443 BTC existed, making the case a lesson in procedure and key custody rather than a judicial validation of the claimed fortune.