British IT worker accidentally throws out HK$50m worth of bitcoin treasure

Buried somewhere under a metre of mud and rubbish in the Docksway landfill site near Newport, south Wales, in a space the size of a football pitch, is a computer hard drive worth more than £4 million (HK$50.4 million).

James Howells threw out the hard drive when he was clearing up his desk in the summer. It was only later that the IT worker remembered that it held a "digital wallet" of virtual currency holding 7,500 bitcoins.

He had created them for almost nothing in 2009 and the value of bitcoins has since soared. This week, the price rose above US$1,000. It has been rising since last week when the US Senate described virtual currencies as a "legitimate financial service".

At the beginning of the month, the currency traded at around US$215.

Howells, a father of two in his early 30s, didn't realise his mistake until last week. 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. And ... nothing."

A spokeswoman from Newport council said any treasure hunters turning up to the landfill site would not be allowed in, but "obviously, if it was easily retrieved, we'd return it".