James Howells threw away a hard drive with bitcoin codes on it which would now be worth around £75million

A Welsh IT worker says he accidentally threw away a hard drive full of Bitcoins which could now be worth £75million.

James Howells, from Newport, chucked out the hard drive in 2013, forgetting that it contained the cryptocurrency which was worth 'a few hundred thousand pounds' at the time.

But after the value of the currency surged by more than 1,000%, he says he's missed out on millions by throwing the device away.

He is now seeking permission from Newport council to go looking for the laptop in the landfill site where he believes it is buried.

The 32-year-old began 'mining' Bitcoin on his laptop in 2009.

He mined 7,500 bitcoins which he saved in a wallet file on his computer hard drive.

He told the Telegraph: 'After I had stopped mining, the laptop I had used was broken into parts and sold on eBay.

'However, I kept the hard drive in a drawer at home knowing it contained my Bitcoin private keys, so that if Bitcoin did become valuable one day I would still have the coins I had mined.

He now wants to excavate this waste site in the hope of finding the hard-drive intact

The value of Bitcoin has surged in recent months as the currency becomes more widely used

He added: 'In mid-2013 during a clear-out, the hard drive - then worth a few hundred thousand pounds - was mistakenly thrown out and put into a general waste bin at my local landfill site, after which it was buried on site.'

He is now examining the legal process and potential cost of digging up the landfill site in a bid to recover the lost drive.

He added: 'A modern landfill is a complex engineering project and digging one up brings up all sorts of environmental issues such as dangerous gasses and potential landfill fires, it’s a big, expensive and risky project.'

Although the cost of diggers and disruption would be a drop in the ocean compared to the wealth he would reap were he to find the drive, with no guarantee of recovering it, it is difficult to find someone to fund the search.

Unlike hard currency which is printed by governments, bitcoin is created by 'miners', who use special software to solve maths problems and are issued bitcoins in return.

Every bitcoin has a public address and a private key, both of which are long combinations of letters and numbers that act as unique identifiers, like fingerprints.

The private key is like a password that is needed to perform any transactions with the bitcoin.

The harddrive was from a laptop like this one which was broken up more than five years ago

The hard drive is thought to be buried in this waste dump, which could now be excavated