"By Darren Little, UK Bureaux News Editor
A man who threw away a computer hard drive containing more than £4m of the digital currency Bitcoin has told Sky News he is devastated.
James Howells, 28, binned the hard drive in the summer, but only realised his mistake last Friday.
The IT worker threw away his Dell laptop after it started to overheat, forgetting that it contained a digital wallet containing 7,500 units of the virtual currency.
Staff at the Docksway landfill site in Newport, South Wales, where the hard drive was taken, have told Mr Howells that by now it will be buried under at least three feet of waste in an area the size of a football pitch.
Mr Howells told Sky News: "It's absolutely devastating to be honest, there's not a feeling I can compare it to."
He "mined" the Bitcoins in 2009 when they were worthless, but in recent times they have gained real monetary value.
"At the time I threw them out I've recently learned they were worth £500,000, and today they're worth approximately £4.2m," he said.
Mr Howells only realised the value of what he had thrown away after reading articles online about the rise of the digital currency.
The landfill site where the Bitcoin laptop owned by James Howells is buried
Image:
The laptop is buried at a landfill site in South Wales
Because of the way the Bitcoin system works there is no way of retrieving them online.
Ownership resides within the hard drive they are stored on, so unless the original working drive can be found Mr Howell has no hope of recovering his lost millions.
Newport City Council told Sky News: "Staff have assisted with the retrieval of items in certain circumstances, but this would have to be done very quickly after it was thrown away.
"However, an item thrown away in the summer would be buried under 25,000 cubic metres of waste and earth.""