It's like looking for a very expensive needle in a very smelly haystack: Hard drive with £5m in Bitcoins is thrown into landfill site by accident

James Howells, from South Wales, 'generated' the Bitcoins in 2009 on his laptop



At the time the 7,500 coins he made were almost completely worthless

He later took the hard-drive out of the laptop and kept it in a drawer

But he threw it out in 2012 and only remembered the Bitcoins last week



Each one is now worth £613 - or £4,597,000 in total

When James Howells spilt lemonade on his laptop, he decided it was not worth keeping.

But he is now ruing his decision – after he realised it had £5million worth of virtual currency stored on the hard drive.



The stash that could make him a millionaire is now buried under four feet of rubbish and mud in a landfill site.

Windfall: Bitcoins could be generated for next to nothing when they were first introduced in 2009, but are now worth more than £600 each

Buried treasure: Mr Howells' valuable hard drive is estimated to be under four feet of rubbish kept on a landfill site (file picture)

Last week, it dawned on him how valuable his collection had become and he went looking for the hard drive.

But when he got to the landfill site in Newport, South Wales, workers broke the bad news that it could be anywhere beneath an area of rubbish the size of a football pitch.

BITCOINS: THE VIRTUAL CURRENCY

Launched in 2009, Bitcoins can be exchanged for goods online and used as virtual tokens rather than physical coins or notes. As with any currency, their value is determined by how much people are willing to exchange them for. In 2011, one bitcoin was worth £1.50 while today it is worth £664. Customers can buy bitcoins from online exchanges. They are growing more popular among the public and investors but have yet to be accepted by websites of major retailers such as Amazon. Bitcoins are stored in a ‘wallet’ on the hard drive of a computer and can be accessed using a ‘private key’. Because they can be bought anonymously, critics say they are used for all sorts of criminal acts such as money laundering.

He told the Guardian: ‘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.’

Bitcoins – which were introduced by a mysterious programmer known as Satoshi Nakamoto – exist only as units of digital data and are not backed by a central bank.

They can be bought, sold and even ‘mined’, which means they are created by enthusiasts who use powerful computers to solve complex mathematical problems.

Mr Howells generated his stash in early 2009, when the currency was known only in tech circles, by running a programme on his laptop for a week.

But he stopped when his girlfriend complained the laptop was getting too noisy.

In 2010, the Dell XPS N1710 broke after he spilt lemonade on it, so he dismantled the computer for parts, kept the drive in a desk drawer and later binned it.

His hoard can only be accessed using a ‘private key’, or digital code. The problem is, the only copy is on his buried hard drive.

Mr Howells said he does not mind if hopefuls try digging for the device.

‘If they were to offer me a share, fair enough. There’s a pot of gold there for someone It’s my mistake throwing the hard drive out, at the end of the day.’

But even if somebody does find it, they won’t be able to get their hands on the cash without his help because the code is encrypted.

A Newport Council spokesman said any treasure hunters turning up at the tip would be turned away.