Buried somewhere under four feet of mud and rubbish, in the Docksway landfill site near Newport, Wales, in a space about the size of a football pitch is a computer hard drive worth more than £4m.It belonged to James Howells, who threw it out when he was clearing up his desk in mid-summer and discovered the part, rescued from a defunct Dell laptop.He found it in a drawer and put it in a bin.And then last Friday he realised that it held a digital wallet with 7,500 Bitcoins created for almost nothing in 2009 - and then worth about the same."You know when you put something in the bin, and in your head, say to yourself 'that's a bad idea'?I really did have that," Howells, who works in IT, told the Guardian."I don't have an exact date, the only time period I can give – and I've been racking my own brains – is between 20 June and 10 August.At the time he obliviously threw them away, the 7,500 Bitcoins on the hard-drive were worth around £500,000.Since then, the cryptocurrency's value has soared, passing $1,000 on Wednesday afternoon.

Although Bitcoins have recently become part of the zeitgeist – with Virgin saying it will accept the currency for its Virgin Galactic flights, and central bankers considering its position in finance seriously – Howells generated his in early 2009, when the currency was only known in tech circles.At that time, a few months after its launch, it was comparatively easy to "mine" the digital currency, effectively creating money by computing: Howells ran a program on his laptop for a week to generate his stash.ethereum roller coasterNowadays, doing the same would require enormously expensive computing power.bitcoin mining intel i7That lost hard drive, though, contains the cryptographic "private key" that is needed to be able to access and spend the Bitcoins; without it, the "money" is lost forever.bitcoin bon investissement

And Howells didn't have a backup.Howells stopped mining after a week because his girlfriend complained that the laptop was getting too noisy and hot while it ran the programs to solve the complex mathematical problems needed to create new Bitcoins.In 2010, the Dell XPS N1710 broke after he accidentally tipped lemonade on it, so he dismantled it for parts.bitcoin gdzie gracMost were thrown away or sold, but he kept the hard drive in a desk drawer for the next three years – until that fateful summer day when he had the clearout.bitcoin texas holdem pokerHowells didn't realise his mistake until Friday.dapat bitcoin dengan cepatSince then, he said, "I've searched high and low.bitcoin 796I've tried to retrieve files from all of my USB sticks, from all of my hard drives.bitcoin bowl 2014 line

I've tried everything just in case I had a backup file, or had copied it by accident.He even went down to the landfill site itself."I had a word with one of the guys down there, explained the situation.And he actually took me out in his truck to where the landfill site is, the current ditch they're working on.It's about the size of a football field, and he said something from three or four months ago would be about three or four feet down."bitcoin is boomingAfter he stopped mining Bitcoins in 2009, Howells hadn't given the currency much thought."I hadn't kept up on Bitcoin, I'd been distracted.I'd had a couple of kids since then, I'd been doing the house up, and forgot about it until it was in the news again."Howells considered retrieving the hard drive himself, but was told that "even for the police to find something, they need a team of 15 guys, two diggers, and all the personal protection equipment.So for me to fund that, it's not possible without the guarantee of money at the end."

As such, he's resigned to never getting the virtual money back.It's available," he said.He has also set up a Bitcoin wallet for donations aimed at recovering the hard drive."If they were to offer me a share, fair enough," he said."If they were to go out and find it for themselves … it's my mistake throwing the hard drive out, at the end of the day."A spokeswoman from Newport council emphasised that any treasure hunters turning up to the landfill site wouldn't be allowed in, but "obviously, if it was easily retrieved, we'd return it.""I'm at the point where it's either laugh about it or cry about it," Howells says."Why aren't I out there with a shovel now?I think I'm just resigned to never being able to find it."Nonetheless, he continues to believe, as he did four years ago, that Bitcoin is the future of money."I still think it's going to go higher.I just think it's the next step of the internet, which is why I mined it in the first place.When I first came across it, I knew straight away.

We had everything else at the time; Google, Facebook, they were already the market leaders in their areas.The only thing that was missing was an internet money."• Bitcoin: what you need to knowLONDON -- An IT worker threw out a computer hard drive without realizing it contained $7.5 million worth of the digital currency Bitcoin.The device is now buried somewhere in a vast landfill site near the home of owner James Howells -- who only realized his mistake when it was too late."It is soul destroying to be honest,” Howells told NBC News on Thursday."I haven’t had much sleep over the past few days.Every second of the day I am thinking about what could have been."Howells, whose ordeal was first reported by the Guardian, worked out the hard drive would have been taken to a local landfill site and visited the dump to speak to the manager.But the hopelessness of his task became clear when he was was told that finding he disk would take weeks even with a team of a dozen people and backhoes.

"I had originally thought about raising money to hunt for the drive, but it was more an off-the-cuff idea.I know it’s gone," he said.Howells posted an image of the landfill site on Twitter.The hard drive is so valuable because it contains the key to 7,500 bitcoins, a currency which exists only in the digital world.The currency was created in 2009 and has recently skyrocketed in value -- hitting $1,000 per unit on Wednesday -- having enjoyed a surge in interest by the media and financial sector.Howells, from Newport, in South Wales, created his 7,500 bitcoins in 2009, when the new currency was only known in niche circles and of little value."It was just after the financial crash and when I found out about Bitcoin it seemed to me to be the perfect alternative," he said."I knew it was going to be huge."The 28-year-old "mined" the currency by running a computer program on his Dell laptop for almost a week, eventually having to turn it off because his girlfriend complained the fans in the machine were getting too hot and noisy at night.

Howells said he was forced to take the hard drive out of the laptop in 2010 when he poured a soft drink over the keyboard, and over the next three years it remained forgotten in his desk drawer.He does not know exactly when he threw it away, but said it was at some point this summer.Bitcoin's popularity had exploded into the mainstream.Norwegian investor Kristoffer Koch made about $800,000 when he bought $27 worth of bitcoins and forgot about them.And before it was closed by the FBI in October the illegal online marketplace Silk Road used Bitcoin to trade goods including drugs and weapons.It was further pushed into the mainstream when Richard Branson announced this week that people would be able to pay for Virgin Galactic space flights using the currency.The first Bitcoin ATM machine opened in Vancouver, Canada, last month.Howells only realized what he had done last Friday."I started hearing all these stories about people making money from Bitcoin, and basically the penny just dropped and I remembered the bitcoins on the hard drive I had thrown away,” he said.