The only reason BTC is as valuable as it is today is because people traded it like that in the past. When you hear someone say they lost a key to $1m in BTC, well it wouldn't be worth $1m if you still had it.

You can recover gold if it sinks to the bottom of the ocean. You lose a backup of your BTC wallet and there's no recovering that ... until some math kid wins a noble prize for figuring out reverse sha hashes in polynomial time ... and then all bets are off for everything.