A judge in rural Breathitt County, Kentucky (population: 13,878) ruled earlier this month that a local man who received a loan of 11.95 bitcoins in December 2013 must repay it, including interest, for a total amount of over $67,800 (about £42,600).

Back then, when the price of one bitcoin was rapidly rising and trading in the $800-$1,000 range, a Brazilian man named Daniel Kaminski de Souza loaned the bitcoins using a peer-to-peer bitcoin loan site called BTCJam. At the time of the loan, those bitcoins were worth about $10,000 (£6,300).

The borrower, Dennis Kerley, offered a 20 percent return to his lenders within a year. His plan was to use the money to buy bitcoin miners—obviously, it didn't work out. Kerley did not respond to Ars’ attempts to reach him on Thursday evening.

As he wrote at the time:

This BTCjam loan is for the purchase of one Bitmine 1 TH/s Desktop Miner and possibly one additional 400 Gh/s based on exchange rate manufactured in Sweden. These two rigs in Turbo mode will produce 2.1 Th/s This will be an great [sic] increase in my current mining capacity, (my current hardware earns ฿0.56/week). This will guarantee profitability with the current high rates of complexity increase.

When Kerley failed to repay the loan 90 days after it was due, de Souza used BTCJam’s arbitration process and was awarded 64.74 bitcoins.

When those bitcoins were still not sent to him, de Souza contacted a US lawyer, who put him in touch with Kevin Palley, a Kentucky-based lawyer. Palley, in turn, filed suit against Kerley in March 2015, seeking either breach of contract or enforcement of the arbitration award.

“That’s one of the dangers of lending money over the Internet,” Palley told Ars on Thursday evening.

He admitted that it would be difficult to collect the money from the Kentucky man.

“Just because I get a judgement, it’s a piece of paper—I can try to put a lien on his house, take his car, but he has various homestead exemptions,” he added, citing a law in Kentucky and elsewhere that exists to protect homeowners with deceased spouses who owe money to creditors.