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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

There are many DPR-related bitcoins that they were unable to access. Fear not.

This was not "half the point of bitcoins" - the intent of the bitcoin release is only hinted at by Satoshi. Any point you are asserting here is pure speculation.

However, if you think this is a valuable property, a so-called "brainwallet" provides exactly this safety. They've been around for ages. No moving of coins required.

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Where there really coins they didn't get? Source? (Not to dispute the claim, just interested)

About it being half the point: Perhaps not stated explicitly, but he knew what he was doing by not baking in a government back door. From the whitepaper: "any two willing parties to transact directly with each other"

I'm probably not getting the joke, but are there people who memorize their secret keys? I've never looked to see how long they are but I assume that's quite a feat.

Maybe it would be more correct to say that BTC can't be remotely seized.

half the point of bitcoin was to provide an alternative to so-called fiat currencies whose value is under the influence of govt policies. The idea was to be an electronic version of a return to the gold standard.

the other half was the flip side of that bitcoin.

No joke. Brainwallets use keys derived from a passphrase. Of course the passphase has to be reasonably long and something no one would ever guess, but even a randomly generated passphrase is easier to memorize than a long string of characters.

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