Bitcoin is simply technological method to establish trust in trust less environment, anonymous online transactions.

What is the value of that trust? It’s whatever people think it’s worth. Read the white paper and decide if it’s for you or not.

My analogy is the value some people place on some art work. Whenever some art painting is sold for $100 million dollars, is it really worth $100 million? To some, yes. To most, no.

The establishment media doesn’t know basic math in encryption, let alone concepts like block chain. Reading the establishment media report on Bitcoin is just for laughs only at this point.

This article seems like empty semantics to me. As they say, "not your keys, not your coins": controlling the private key feels like a reasonable proxy of "ownership" in common parlance.

If you want to get really pedantic about it, then contrary to this article's assertion that

> Bitcoin is “stored” on a the public blockchain

The blockchain is just a record of transactions showing the movement of bitcoin values between wallet addresses. It's not like "a bitcoin" is some discrete thing saved inside the blockchain.

It depends on how the criminal chose to "store" their Bitcoins, though. If he used an encrypted wallet and only memorized the password to decrypt the wallet, he is screwed. If he memorized the actual private seed of a wallet, he still has his Bitcoins, and the police doesn't have anything.

Where should one store the 24 word key though? Are password managers a good option? Physically storing them on paper has its own problems.

You could try to memorize it. I don't have a good answer. Whole novels have been written about the hiding of secrets.

Password manager doesn't really help in principle, as you again need the password for the password manager.

One thing I am looking into is Shamir's Secret Sharing to split a secret into multiple parts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing

IMHO wealth is not something you 'own'.

It's more like a contract, for the rest of society to repay you for the value you've created for them.

Of course that ideal is far from the current reality, but bitcoin doesn't really move us toward that ideal, in fact I think exactly the opposite is true.

why not? Bitcoin has the property that it is hard to forge, and difficult to double spend, etc (not easy for an electronic medium). Like gold, trust could be placed in it - and thus, has value like gold has value in today's economic system.

it's value is the work other people will do for you in exchange for it.

In the case of bitcoin, it seems like that contract is an incredibly poor deal for most people, and an amazing windfall for a few.