The device is now buried under a mountain of garbage at a landfill site in Wales.It will be almost impossible to find.James Howells got rid of the drive, which holds a digital store of 7,500 bitcoins, between June and August this year.The IT worker mined the virtual currency four years ago when it was the exclusive domain of tech geeks.Back then bitcoin was worth very little.On Friday, the cryptocurrency broke through $1,200, making the missing hard drive worth around $9 million.Howells had been hanging onto it for several years before deciding to clean up his home.After discovering the mistake late last week, a "devastated" Howells began a frantic search through computer files and other drives for a backup.A trip to the garbage dump was the only option."As soon as I saw the site, I thought you've got no chance.The area covered is huge," he told CNN.A spokesperson for Newport City Council said an item thrown away in the summer months would now be buried under 25,000 cubic meters of waste and earth.

The council, which operates the dump, said it has helped retrieve items in some circumstances "but this would have to be done very quickly after it was thrown away."Howells said he's had all sorts of suggestions emailed to him about how to get the drive back.But well-meaning individuals shouldn't bother heading to the tip on his behalf - it's closed to the public for safety reasons.Speculators have helped power bitcoin's dazzling rise this year.dogecoin payA growing number of businesses now accept bitcoins, including some Subway sandwich shops and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space travel venture, though critics claim it's unlikely to become a legitimate currency.litecoin pool forumThe program behind bitcoin was created anonymously and introduced on the internet in 2010.bitcoin plein

Unlike traditional money, bitcoins are not managed by a central authority and exist only in cyberspace.-- CNN's Adam Dunnakey contributed to this report.Share This Story!Let friends in your social network know what you are reading aboutTwitterGoogle+LinkedInPinterestPosted!A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.$7.5M Bitcoin fortune buried in landfillSitting beneath about four feet of garbage in an area of a Welsh landfill the size of a football field sits a fortune — in the form of a computer hard drive that James Howells threw out this summer while cleaning up his workspace.On it: the cryptographic "private key" he needs to access 7,500 Bitcoins.bitcoin android nfcAnd since the digital currency hit a major milestone yesterday, with a single coin now worth more than $1,000 on the most popular exchange, that tossed hard drive is worth more than $7.5 million.Unfortunately, Howells doesn't have a firm sense of when he sent it to its resting place in the Docksway landfill near Newport, Wales, though he's been racking his brain since Friday, when he realized his error: "between June 20 and Aug.o que são bitcoins e como ganhar

Probably mid-July" is the best he can come up with.NEWSER: Sears owner defies Thanksgiving orderIt was a dumb move then, too: The Guardian estimates the Bitcoins were worth just north of $800,000 at the time.Howells amassed his Bitcoins in February 2009, reports Ars Technica, after just a week of running a program on his laptop; but he knocked lemonade on the laptop a year later and broke it down for parts.He eventually tossed the hard drive without remembering what was on it.And his chances of getting it back don't look good.bitcoin haitatHe tells the Guardian that even for the police to find it, they'd 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."Asfor those who want to give it a go on their own, bad news: A rep for the city council says searchers will be turned away.For another tale of money lost ... and found, visit Newser, a USA TODAY content partner providing general news, commentary and coverage from around the Web.

Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.A man from Newport, Wales, is searching the dump for a hard drive he threw away despite it having $7.5 million worth of bitcoins.Bitcoins are a digital currency whose value has benefited from intense attention and speculative investing.They can be stored as data in digital wallets using online services, mobile phones, or computer hard drives.James Howells chose the latter approach when he stored 7,500 bitcoins away in 2009, when they were worth a trifling fraction of Bitcoins' current value of more that $1,000 apiece.But he threw the old hard drive away, and now it's likely buried several feet deep in trash in a landfill the size of a football field, according to a BBC report.He's searching the landfill, but lacks the funds for a serious hunt."The truth is I haven't got the funds or ability to make that happen at the moment without a definite pay cheque at the end of it," he told the BBC.Those who want to give Howells a hand might be interested in an Indiegogo effort to fund a recovery effort.

Bitcoins, being just data, can be backed up, but he couldn't find any duplicate copies of his bitcoins, he said.He's not the first to forget about a lot of very valuable bits.But in a happier ending, a Norwegian man named Kristoffer Koch remembered his 2009 stash of $25 worth of bitcoins in time and cashed them out when they had grown in value to about $848,000.Updated at 12:14 a.m.PT November 30 to mention an Indiegogo effort to fund a search for the hard drive.(Via The Verge) Adios, turbulence.Pilots have a new way to outfox youBuried 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.

Nowadays, doing the same would require enormously expensive computing power.That 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.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.Most 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.Howells didn't realise his mistake until Friday.Since then, he said, "I've searched high and low.I've tried to retrieve files from all of my USB sticks, from all of my hard drives.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."After 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 know