Meet the devastated owner of a bitcoins hard drive worth £4m that was accidentally thrown away in Wales


James Howells is kicking himself after throwing away a computer hard drive worth millions of pounds.

The IT technician made the costly blunder of accidentally getting rid of the drive which contained 7,500 bitcoins.

It had been gathering dust in a drawer for years after generating the digital currency in 2009. Since then, bitcoins have skyrocketed in value, and the hard drive was worth £4m.

The drive is now somewhere in a landfill site in Newport, Wales getting buried ever deeper under other rubbish.

James said he was devastated when he realised what he had done: "I was in front of my computer, the drawer where the drive was kept was only a few yards away and the first thing I did was move to that drawer, and look, even though I knew it wasn't there, it was still the first thing I did."

"From the very first time I came across bitcoin I knew it was going to be a good investment and I knew it was going to be the next big thing. I mean, devastating really. What else can I say?" he added.

Bitcoin trades 24 hours a day, every day. The supply of the currency, which is "mined" by solving math problems, is limited, and recently stood at 12 million bitcoins, worth about £8 billion at recent prices.