Accidentally throwing off a dollar or even a hundred bucks can be disconcerting, but that's nothing compared to what British IT worker James Howells lost. He would have been $7.5 million richer had he not thrown away a hard drive containing the key to access the Bitcoins he had "mine" since 2009.

"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," Mr Howells told The Guardian.

It turned out that it was really a bad idea. Sometime "between June 20 and August 10, probably mid-July," he has thrown out a hard drive that contains 7,500 Bitcoins.

At that time the cryptocurrency's value was around USD890,000. But just this Wednesday, Bitcoin's value soared beyond USD1,000, making the total value of the Bitcoins USD7.5 million.

So how did one just throw away millions of dollars? How did he even come up with that much in the first place?

As Mr Howells told the UK paper, he started generating the currency in early 2009 just a few months after its launch. Bitcoin wasn't popular back then; only those in the tech industry know about it and how to get it. At that time, it was a lot easier to "mine" Bitcoins by running computers to perform the calculations to make the currency. He was able to generate Bitcoins just by running a program on his computer for a week.

Back to 2013, the IT worker was clearing up his desk when he discovered the hard drive of his old Dell laptop. He put it in a bin. And that's the start of his regret.

It was just on Friday when he realised his mistake. He remembered that the computer part contains the cryptographic "private key" he needs so he can access his 7,500 Bitcoins. Without the key, his Bitcoins are practically useless.

So somewhere under four feet of rubbish in a football field-size landfill site near Newport, Wales is a virtual treasure that can actually make someone rich.

"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," Mr Howells said.

He hadn't. There was no backup, unfortunately.

He didn't search the landfill himself, but he had gone out to the area and had seen for himself how futile his effort would be if he had searched the land himself. He was told that he would need more than a dozen people and equipment to look for the hard drive in the area. With USD7.5 million, he could easily fund that. But there's no guarantee that they would find the hard drive; hence, the money to pay for their work isn't guaranteed as well.

Mr Howells has set up a recovery fund to retrieve his Bitcoins, but he's not really expecting anything to come out of it. He's thinking of registering www.returnmybitcoin.com, but in the end, he knew he had no other choice but to accept his loss.

"I'm at the point where it's either laugh about it or cry about it. Why aren't I out there with a shovel now? I think I'm just resigned to never being able to find it."

He added, "There's a pot of gold there for someone."

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