You just need to remember one seed and suddenly you have billions of dollars of value stored in your brain. I don't think that's a realistic possibility.
> You just need to remember one seed and suddenly you have billions of dollars of value stored in your brain. I don't think that's a realistic possibility.
BIP39 mnemonics ("seeds") were not around in the early days. Bitcoin core software generated random private keys that were completely unrelated to one another. So it was necessary to backup the wallet file each time that new keys were created. Most users would generate hundreds (or thousands) of keys at a time, to reduce the frequency of backups.
EDIT: downvoted for asking a question
edit: and obviously you can't remember that but if you encrypt your wallet you can save it to long term storages like Dropbox / differrent servers / medias / etc, what Satoshi would most likely be doing
Private keys are just numbers. That has not changed since the beginning.
Anyway, my general point stands, just s/remember a seed/store an encrypted file
Personally I think Satoshi is either dead or never going to move his bitcoin.
All it takes is spilling some coffee on your laptop.
* - Except where you point out that it's your opinion
For multiple reasons
> It was utterly worthless at the time
If you read what Satoshi wrote, he didn't think it would be worthless in the future at all.
> (and today in my opinion)
Your opinion is contradicted by reality
> we know plenty of people who lost multi tens of thousands of bitcoins.
They weren't the creators
For example, pizza-Bitcoin guy. The stories always talk about how he traded 10,000 Bitcoins for two pizzas. That's only a small part of the story, what actually happened is drastically worse. He sold several times that many Bitcoins in other low-value transactions at the same time (some straight up for cash) and did the pizza trade more than once.
Pizza guy likely traded a minimum of 50,000 Bitcoins for less than a few hundred dollars of value. That's $1.6 billion presently at 50k.
I know a lot of security phds who fall for phishing emails. The hugely likely outcome of btc was that it would end up worthless. "Oh crap, those keys were stored on that disk" after dropping it on the floor or having a laptop stolen is an entirely reasonable situation.