This is possibly the silliest thing I have read today. - if the owner decided to take the btc it would all already be gone. if he (guessing but the odds are 'he') wanted his friends to have it... same.. poof.. gone...  - the something that you believe (still not sure what that is btw- but a guess is to follow) that you will believe differently when you find a private key etc... I'm guessing is some sort of strange conspiracy where a guy takes a hundred billfolds with money in them, hides them all over the place and goes "find them" but secretly tells his friends where they are.. umm a) - why not just hand over some bills to your pal bob? b) why... like why the whole thing at all?  c) if that was the case, owner/friends would go get the 1.6 immediately.   -as a sidenote, but only slightly to the side... somewhere the owner spoke up and was talking about it being a way to encourage people to see what they can do towards figuring out ways around the cryptography, thus proving/disproving the "safety" of your coins. As we have seen, so long as you didn't use reaaaaally low entropy keys, and so long as you don't reuse an address you are fairly okay (so far) but keep using the same address and you are asking for trouble... maybe not fast trouble.. but trouble none-the-less. (It is my personal belief that the move revealing the pubkeys was prompted by all the talk about programs to get the private key from public and he was like "well hey let's see what they can really do here..." (otherwise why skip by five...) Now if you want a plausible conspiracy - which doesn't really take away from the "puzzle" so much as show a human side to things.. let's say bob creates puzzle when btc is cheap as dirt.. time goes on.. btc gets really up there.. bob has a hospital bill/car trouble/baby on the way etc.. whatever... people are popping off with prv key from pub, he needs a little something... but more than .62 so move.. and grab the first one.. still giving others a shot  (This imho is still VERY unlikely.. 'cause as we know he already has all the keys.. could take whenever he likes. so really he could have just snagged it all and walked away if he needed cash, so he really wants people to strive for better/shorter ways or similar to the lbc show exactly how hard this would be to do... the harder it is btw the more acceptable it is to joe public even though they will never REALLY understand that it is ALREADY harder even with low entropy to get a priv key than it is to get into their bank account - or their atm pin which is likely to be a family member's b-day anniversary or some foolish stuff like that.)
There is my 5 satoshi. inflation yo.