Sure, you can represent private keys in many different formats and the keyspace is effectively 160-bit when brute forcing known addresses. I'm just making the point that unlike rocks and flags, bitcoin is intangible and more like speech.

If I posted a number which happened to have a value of $14,001 USD in this post, I would be breaking the law. If I sold t-shirts with bitcoin private keys printed on them, I would be considered an unlicensed money transmitter by FinCEN.