Quote from: Xav on January 23, 2014, 09:56:28 AM

Thanks guys. Maybe I didn't express my thoughts clearly enough, but I did not lose any coins, yet. I was just wondering why people lose coins if all can be restored by remembering the private key. BTW I think the safest place to store a private key is in your own brain; of course not in the form of a completely random string of characters, albeit as a quite unique sentence, which you encrypt and hash on a stand alone (offline) computer. The FBI confiscated BTC170,000, now why wouldn't these 'criminals' (or their partners) have moved these coins to another wallet, or were the FBI-agents smart enough to do this themselves already. Hmm, just thinking out loud again ...

It's not that easy. The problem is, most Bitcoin clients generate a new address every time you send money where the change is transferred to (see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Change). So you'd have to memorize a new private key everytime you spend money. To circumvent this you can use a deterministic wallet like armory. It generates a unique "seed" that you need to memorize and can regenerate every address then.