> So not impossible, you _just_ have to guess the owners private key? Yes, by impossible I meant computationally infeasible (at the moment) > The corollary of

> So not impossible, you _just_ have to guess the owners private key? Yes, by impossible I meant computationally infeasible (at the moment) > The corollary of this appears to be that you'd then be able to take anyone's bitcoins? Yes, there's no way of recovering long abandoned coins (e.g. the genesis block coins) that couldn't be used to steal newly minted coins