This may actually be a very good idea for some cases. If the stuff being protected by the key is, for example, the type of data that someone would otherwise ke

This may actually be a very good idea for some cases. If the stuff being protected by the key is, for example, the type of data that someone would otherwise keep in a personal fire-safe, then simply printing out the keys and keeping them in that fire-safe wouldn't change the type of security being provided. It might be nice if we had some type of highly-reliable (like the redundancy in QR codes[1]), so the process of printing out a key and re-scanning it was easy and trustworthy. [1] http://datagenetics.com/blog/november12013/index.html http://datagenetics.com/blog/november12013/index.html