Quote from: wilth1 on February 20, 2015, 07:01:32 PM

-Partition into as many wallets as can be managed so that no loss is catastrophic
-Store all wallets offline
-Make multiple encrypted wallet backups
-Use multisig

Who is your hypothetical "thief" adversary? It makes all the difference.

Diversification into multiple wallets/accounts is a good idea in principle, but the downside is the resulting increase in complexity, and risk that funds of one of those accounts could be lost or stolen. People could argue endlessly about whether it is better to have one tightly secured wallet or 10 wallets with less exhaustive security.

One approach would be to tightly secure a "long term savings" account that is not accessed very often, while holding a smaller amount of BTC in a 'daily use' wallet. But this doesn't evade the conundrum in the OP, of theft mitigation vs. lost password mitigation. If anything relying on multiple accounts (which I agree is a good idea) makes everything even more complicated.

Regarding the ID of the thief, I'm trying to be all-encompassing here - seeking a "best practices" approach that will span a person's life with minimal risk of BTC loss from either theft (of any sort) or loss of account access (for any reason).