The decentralized nature of BTC makes it crucially important that you maintain control over your private keys. You can lose access to your BTC forever if you lose these all-important codes. Thats exactly what happened to me when i formatted my computer and forgot that it contained my private keys to 2 BTC that I've worked so hard to earn. Learned from that mistake now i always backed up my files to my Google cloud account. Now I'm regaining that lost by playing gambling games at vegascasino.