Ah, thanks, this is very informative and actually relates to a question I was going to ask in another thread but I might as well ask it here:  a private key is often associated with money, like a ordered pair in a dictionary, yes?  Meaning, you have a private key in your bitcoin digital wallet, known only to you, with an amount in bitcoin next to it:  private key <---> value in bitcoin.  So if you lose your private keys, you lose your money, because each private key has a bitcoin value associated with it (the value could be zero if the key has not been used in a transaction I suppose).  That's why you should backup your wallet (unless you use a 'deterministic' wallet, where if you know the root key it will automatically generate all the other keys, then you can use the 'blockchain' to construct how much value each private key has, I think somewhat that's correct)?

Is this somewhat correct?

TonyT