Well I sure hope, for his sake, that wasn’t all of it...
Wouldn’t you have to be pretty stupid to have that much crypto at a single point of failure?
Just like why you don’t keep all your cash in a mattress. Keep some private keys in a safe in the cellar at grandma’s ranch, or encode them in a picture of yourself hanging on her wall.
Is steganography a thing with real-world works of art? I know that with digital photos, it's simply a matter of interspersing the information in its bits, but I'm not sure how that would translate with an actual physical copy.
How would that work? Take a picture of the picture and hash it? Wouldn't that just make the picture you took the source of entropy not the physical one?
You might have something in the image that you could interpret as 1s and 0s. Say, heights of trees in a line. If the next one is bigger, 1, if it's smaller, 0, etc.
If you can reliably produce the same hash from the painting over and over again[1], you can use the painting as the source, and throw away the picture.
Wouldn’t you have to be pretty stupid to have that much crypto at a single point of failure?
Just like why you don’t keep all your cash in a mattress. Keep some private keys in a safe in the cellar at grandma’s ranch, or encode them in a picture of yourself hanging on her wall.