Vladimir said: Amnesia could be a very expensive illness in bitcoin land, take care. You've been warned!

This got me thinking. We all die and suffer accidents in ways that often stretch our imagination to envisage. It has always been thus. Today we still occasionally find roman coins hidden by people who through bad luck or bad planning or a bit of both were unable to retrieve their fortunes (See 1) the story of a find of a crock of roman gold coins that weighed 25 stone, or (2) the moving story of a family on the run from the Nazis who burried their fortune in a London house that was bombed and then found 50 years later.

The point is this can NEVER happen with bitcoin. In some ways its a good thing, undoubtedly this removes the incentive for someone to "arrange"an accident for me. But it also seems sad and in a way deficient that while a store of value manufactured in roman times, still serves as exactly that now, even though we do no know who it belonged to, and that a store of value from WW2 was returned successfully to the descendants of the person who hid it, this cannot happen with bitcoin. Could it be that after say 100 years a lost coin is returned to something like a mining pool?  Is there any other way to return or re-mint lost bitcoins?

1) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1292990/Chef-Dave-Crisp-discovers-largest-hoard-Roman-coins-Somerset-field.html
2) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-13128903

buy this for ~$70 depending on retailer
https://www.ironkey.com/basic

keep wallet.dat savings in a truecrypt container on it. ironkeys have a mouse keyboard you can use to defeat keyloggers to open your truecrypt file. brute force and even physical attack on ironkeys is pointless they self delete after 10 tries or from physical tampering

to remember a giant password that you don't want to have to write down for security risk, or you don't trust Bruce Schneier's twofish encrypyted Password Safe for whatever reasons then grab a dvd/book and use parts of it to make the password.

Example:

Grab your copy of Battletoads lying around and use the UPC and first sentence to make a pass: http://www.sega-mag.com/jeux/cover/Megadrive/Battletoads-Megadrive-EUR.jpg

alternate shift + caps

9&4#6%6!0^4&WtEdQkYbBaTbPa,ItTgRM,AtGe!
39 char pass you'll never forget as long as battletoads doesn't get thrown out

Exactly! What does THIS mean?
4  create a truecrypt disk with image stored on this USB drive so that all bitcoin files and datadir and
therefore wallet.dat are on this truecrypt disk and make a .bat or .sh file which starts bitcoin client from this USB drive.

I now see that the wallet is one of the weakest aspects of bitcoin so far. This is going to continue causing misery for so many!

I was about to fire up a live Ubuntu USB with Truecrypt as this guide suggest, when I realized that the new client (0.4) that I'm going to run on the USB Live disk, already has the ability to encrypt my wallet.
Is there any reason to encrypt the wallet using Truecrypt when the client itself supports it?

I see. I think I'm going for Truecrypt, also because it's had some years for people to find holes in its encryption implementation, while the Bitcoin client's implementation is fairly new.

^ The market seems to disagree you with.

Anybody trademark cryptocoin yet?

What about putting the wallet on a Truecrypt protected bootable USB stick that only has Bitcoin stuff on it and is only used for Bitcoin.  Then there would be no possibility of keyloggers or other background processes spying out your password.

I tried to set up a USB stick like this last year but was unsuccessful, but if somebody who knows what they are doing could do this and upload the image, it would surely make many people feel more secure.

a better cheaper version of this is to download Ubuntu onto a Live CD.  start up your system off the CD and download Bitcoin and create a wallet.  note down one address and email it to yourself.

copy the wallet.dat over to a few Ironkeys and spread them around town.

shut down Live CD session and all data is wiped from RAM.

...or generate an address, write down the private key on paper...destroy the digital copy, put paper somewhere safe. Now your savings address is as safe as it can be from hackers.