Bitcoin Forum

I believe this case is quite famous and everyone knows about it these days, James Howells lost a stash worth 75 million bitcoins back in 2013, presumably lost somewhere under 20 tons of garbage in England.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/bitcoin-lost-newport-landfill

As we are unlucky that we probably will never own 75 million worth in cryptocurrency, we certainly are lucky to not have lost it, if in a hypothetical world James Howells had found his hardrive, but it's partially broken, later he find out that it's possible to recover but half of the content is forever lost, in the logic of blockchains can data be "corrupted"? For example he loses half of the money and by a domino effect he ends up losing everything, is that possible? :-[
I love thinking in hypothetical situations.  :D

There's no data that is immune to corruption, so it's possible in theory. What has to be noted, though, is that there are thousands more people out there with a working copy of the blockchain, with some being hosted on state of the art computers. Unless they all get corrupted simultaneously, you have nothing at all to worry about. That's the beauty of decentralization.

I think it can not be corrupted but can be used for corruption. Bitcoin is decentralized so no one can control it but someone can always manipulate the price which can be a source of corruption for example if a company make a fraud statement that bitcoin will no longer exist next month and they offer to buy all your coins for a cheaper price.

Please correct me if Im wrong :)

The two most likely outcomes are that he loses everything, or loses nothing. Either the wallet.dat is corrupted or it isn't. At this point -- in a landfill environment exposed to the elements -- that hard drive is probably extremely degraded. It would be a miracle if the wallet were recoverable.

The guy is still holding out hope that an excavation will be allowed even though it would be an ecological hazard. Sort of a wingnut. The city knows the bitcoins are probably lost.

I believe bitcoin cannot get corrupted but can be used for corruption.. For example hackers or terrorists asking for ransom to be transferred using bitcoin, this way it is used for corruption and it cannot be controlled or traced. The missing hard drive if it was eventually found would have been useless, because either it might have an outdated software or james would have forgotten his passwords or mnemonic phrases.. Even if it should be hacked the drive might be partially broken and decaying for many years  under those tons dirts

Every form of digitally stored data can get corrupted and / or lost. Digital mediums arguably have a shorter lifetime than most analog forms -- eg. the average lifetime of hard drives is shorter than the average lifetime of books. However the upside of digital data is that perfect copies can be created easily and cheaply. That's why you back up and replicate the shit out of it.

Every file can be subjected to corruption of data, and his wallet.dat is absolutely no exception. With the way how conventional hard drives store data, it's possible that the part of the disk wherein the data is stored is badly damaged, thus having an incomplete or partly-corrupted wallet.dat. However, if the file is safely stored and no physical damage is done on a hard disk,  the only thing that can corrupt the file is a virus or a malware that snipes these files in order to make them useless. Blockchain, on the contrary, wouldn't be corrupted as a whole knowing that the network is distributed all across the globe and no central PC is responsible in storing all the data recorded--every node has a copy that can still survive even if a multitude fails.