Speaking of losing Bitcoin private keys, I think that's the best explanation for the mystery of why Nakamoto has never spent any of their enormous BTC account. Nakamoto might have been a genius but one of the blind spots of the whole Bitcoin project for many years was private key safety. The importance of keeping private keys in hardware was well known by smartcard systems designers since c. 1990 but it took the Bitcoin world four or five years to reinvent that wheel (I count Trezor as the first hardware Bitcoin wallet, coming out in 2014).
I think there's a very interesting history-of-technology story to explore: Why didn't the Bitcoin pioneers pay more attention to private key safety? And was Nakamoto themselves a victim of frying their own private key or throwing the hard drive out in the trash?
PS. It's a bit arcane but I think the reason they overlooked private key safety for so long is they were fixated on public keys. One of the strongest (albeit most subtle) strengths of Bitcoin and the like is these are the only public key cryptographic security systems I can think of that have no public key lifecycle management. That is, there is no assignment or binding of public keys to users. The system works even though no one knows which public key goes with which user. That's magic.
Shipwreck, trainwreck. Take your pick!
Speaking of losing Bitcoin private keys, I think that's the best explanation for the mystery of why Nakamoto has never spent any of their enormous BTC account. Nakamoto might have been a genius but one of the blind spots of the whole Bitcoin project for many years was private key safety. The importance of keeping private keys in hardware was well known by smartcard systems designers since c. 1990 but it took the Bitcoin world four or five years to reinvent that wheel (I count Trezor as the first hardware Bitcoin wallet, coming out in 2014).
I think there's a very interesting history-of-technology story to explore: Why didn't the Bitcoin pioneers pay more attention to private key safety? And was Nakamoto themselves a victim of frying their own private key or throwing the hard drive out in the trash?
PS. It's a bit arcane but I think the reason they overlooked private key safety for so long is they were fixated on public keys. One of the strongest (albeit most subtle) strengths of Bitcoin and the like is these are the only public key cryptographic security systems I can think of that have no public key lifecycle management. That is, there is no assignment or binding of public keys to users. The system works even though no one knows which public key goes with which user. That's magic.