James Howells, a computer engineer, was tidying up his old computers and accidentally threw away a laptop containing 7500 Bitcoins in 2013, which was worth £750,000. Today it is more likely to be around £40 million!

He spilt a drink on the device and decided to leave it for collection and removal to the household waste recycling centre near Newport in Wales, only realising later that the hard drive contained his digital wallet (McCormick, 2013). Howells visited the waste recycling centre only to discover that his computer, along with significant amounts of other waste, was buried deep under metres of items, somewhere in a space bigger than the size of a football pitch, and could not be recovered.

This case highlighted one of the vulnerabilities of bitcoins, that if stored on a device, there is no way to retrieve them other than via that device. Since this time many bitcoin owners have backed up their systems, just in case.

Questions

• Perhaps you don’t own any Bitcoins, but how do you back up your data?

• Have you lost data when a Macbook or laptop has failed? If yes, how did you cope with the data loss?

• What might be the impact if your Macbook or laptop failed later today?