What I wasn't sure of was that if Satoshi had recorded on paper how to access his Bitcoin holdings (yes, I appreciate there could be 20,000 wallets) how might he have done it to be believable in story form. (A suggestion was made that all of that information would probably be on a digital device, like a memory stick (like others have imagined the story). I like to imagine that Satoshi might have also recorded his wallets' information in good old-fashioned paper form.)
I like to imagine that Satoshi may have recorded every wallet he created with every block he solved onto a spreadsheet and then printed it all out. I like to think he was meticulous about it. I like to imagine that the form this spreadsheet would take would be five columns: mining date/wallet password/public digital key/private digital key/number of BTC mined (typically 50). And that will give anyone all the information they need to access his fortune.
I am still not entirely certain of what form the public and private keys would take. I believe they would both be strings of random numbers and letters (alphanumeric), sixty-four characters in length. (I am still not sure if this is correct and whether the letters would be a mixture of upper and lower case. I will research some more.)
private key not case sensitive, public address is case sensitive
demo look using random keys made up
block private public address BTC
1 e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855 1HZwkjkeaoZfTSaJxDw6aKkxp45agDiEzN 50
2 545cb431133cc640dc1c8fc3ddf79ddce6e1140577e2fc835dbeae25e6a2357a 12kqu4q3NFjGsjLNjdLRxjrjHKjP99B6kK 50
3 ab68c94c2cc0ebcf2784c355fbe020b4698b53f3f1747f4787d7db9251aed5a8 1QK9nCJHMqko1Jojce21trQ4VF5ovfx9qz 50
more 'factually' the funds went to, not a public
address but a public
keyEG
04a34b99f22c790c4e36b2b3c2c35a36db06226e41c692fc82b8b56ac1c540c5bd5b8dec5235a0f
a8722476c7709c02559e3aa73aa03918ba2d492eea75abea235
public key is also non case sensitive hex
but if you want a more plausible story, that aligns more with history and/or logic
back in 2009 satoshi created a new currency, but it had no value, so no financial gain to think about early on.. he also did not want to profit from it, he only used sats of blockrewards to test his system and was not interested in backing up his wallet.
and so instead, every time he updated his node with new code it would overwrite the wallet and start again thus not retain the keys, thus he didnt have access to the keys when he finally disappeared in 2011