A federal appeals court has rejected a Florida man’s attempt to recover $354 million worth of Bitcoin he claimed was lost when authorities destroyed a hard drive seized during his 2019 arrest on forgery and identity theft charges.
In a decision released Tuesday, the 11th Circuit upheld a lower court’s decision denying Michael Prime’s claim for property restitution, arguing that he waited too long to file his claim and that the delay prevented the government from returning his destroyed hard drive.
“For years, Prime denied having any significant amounts of Bitcoin at all, and when he sought to recover his lost assets after his release from prison, Bitcoin was not on his list,” the circuit judges wrote. bring the action.
They added that it was “even later” that Prime claimed to be “the king of Bitcoin.”
The court said Prime had repeatedly told investigators, probation officers, and the sentencing judge that he owned little or no cryptocurrencies, contradicting subsequent claims that he owned “nearly 3,443 bitcoins.”
Federal agents relied on his initial statement to end the search for Bitcoin and later destroyed the seized devices, including the orange hard drive at the center of the case.
Prime, who was sentenced to more than five years in prison in 2020 for access device fraud, aggravated identity theft, and illegal possession of a firearm, claimed after his release that his hard drive contained the encryption keys for his missing Bitcoin.
He filed the following motion: Rule 41(g)This allows the defendant to seek the return of seized property after the lawsuit is over. A district court rejected this in 2024, ruling that the equipment was “properly destroyed” and that Mr. Prime’s long-standing denials brought his claims too late.
The 11th Circuit agreed in its ruling, saying the prime minister’s “inexcusable delay” “disadvantaged the government” and that the compensation was unfair “even if Bitcoin existed.”
lost coin
Bitcoin itself is not stored on your hard drive. It exists on the blockchain, a public ledger shared among thousands of computers. What you can store on your hard drive is a private key or wallet file that allows you to access and spend Bitcoin linked to your address.
Without these keys, your Bitcoins would probably still be there, but they would be virtually unreachable since ownership cannot be proven or transferred.
“If you lose a coin, it just makes someone else’s coin worth a little bit more. Think of it as a donation to everyone,” says Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto. I wrote In 2010.
2025 report Bitcoin-only financial institution River Financial estimates that between 2.3 million and 4 million BTC, equivalent to 11% to 18% of the total supply, will be permanently lost.
Approximately 3.8 million BTC are linked to wallets that have been inactive for over 10 years, and approximately 19.8 million coins were mined out of the hard cap of 21 million coins. River Financial estimates that the effective circulating supply is likely between 15.8 million and 17.5 million BTC.
