Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) Plan

A business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan is a documented set of procedures an organization maintains so that critical operations survive disruptions such as cyberattacks, infrastructure failures, natural disasters, or the loss of key personnel. Plans are typically built around two measured targets: the recovery time objective, how quickly service resumes, and the recovery point objective, how much data may be lost, often specified in hours.

Why it matters

For firms holding bitcoin or gold on behalf of customers, BCDR is not paperwork, it is the difference between an incident and an extinction event. A custodian's plan must answer hard questions: if the primary signing facility burns down, can withdrawals resume from geographically separate key shards; if executives die, do quorum arrangements keep funds reachable without making any single survivor a theft risk. Regulators increasingly demand this, and New York's BitLicense regime explicitly requires licensed virtual currency firms to maintain BCDR plans. The 2013 death of a Canadian exchange founder who allegedly held sole access to customer funds remains the industry's defining cautionary tale.

In the gold vs bitcoin debate

Disaster recovery exposes each asset's failure modes. Gold survives any technological collapse but is hard to duplicate: a vault lost to war or seizure is simply gone. Bitcoin keys can be backed up endlessly at near zero cost, split by multisignature across continents, and restored from words in memory, yet a backup failure can erase holdings completely. Individuals face the same design problem as institutions, inheritance and recovery planning, scaled down.