However we never got around to publishing that key: I kept hoping we’d find a recoverable backup somewhere, and we were all reluctant to admit our mistakes. The embarrassment got worse as the price of BTC shot up dramatically: at the peak (November 2013), it hit $1147/BTC, making this a $430,000 accident. Ouch.
The long term “entropic” loss of crypto money could be a challenge. It’s one of the reasons I’m more optimistic (less pessimistic) about Bitcoin for transactions than value store. Over time, money will disappear. A monotonically shrinking money supply is a problem we haven’t dealt with before.