Many people have a tale of a lost or broken hard drive containing some bit of precious data they wish they could recover. But perhaps no one on the planet has thrown out a hard drive as valuable as the one James Howells says is now buried in a landfill.

According to an article in The Guardian today, Howells threw out the hard drive, "rescued from a defunct Dell laptop," this past summer. "And then last Friday he realised that it held a digital wallet with 7,500 Bitcoins created for almost nothing in 2009," the story notes.

Howells, an IT pro, says his mistake likely occurred in mid-July, at which time a single bitcoin was worth about $90. Today, the value of a single bitcoin passed $1,000 for the first time, making 7,500 bitcoins worth $7.5 million.



According to The Guardian story, Howells did not have a backup. The drive he allegedly threw out "contains the cryptographic 'private key' that is needed to be able to access and spend the bitcoins; without it, the 'money' is lost forever."

Howells says he mined the 7,500 bitcoins in 2009. "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," The Guardian says.

He later dismantled the laptop for parts after it broke, keeping the hard drive "in a desk drawer for the next three years—until that fateful summer day when he had the clearout."

The hard drive itself is believed to be in a landfill near Newport, Wales.

"He even went down to the landfill site itself," The Guardian writes. "'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.'"

Howells realizes the chances of recovering his bitcoins are, sadly, not good. "I'm at the point where it's either laugh about it or cry about it," he said.

UPDATE: Some readers have questioned whether it would have been possible to mine 7,500 bitcoins in a week, even in 2009 when Bitcoin had just been introduced. We've e-mailed Howells, and he replied, "I assure you, it's genuine." He doesn't have proof of the bitcoin mining, but said, "I stumbled upon it back in February 2009, set it all up, mined for about a week and then stopped."

February 2009 was just one month after Bitcoin was introduced to the world.

The story of Howells' bitcoin loss spread without his intending it to. "I didn't ask for all this attention, I simply asked a question in an IRC chat room last night, then answered a few questions that the guys asked me, and all of a sudden this madness," he said.