You mean there are venture capitalists who can't do basic risk assessment?

That's how these miner manufacturers operate. It is relatively low and well-understood risk to sell physical goods. We have X orders, and can produce Y units each month. The reason they don't mine bitcoins themselves is that they don't want to take that risk. They sell the machine, and they get their money. They sell more machines, they get more money. It's simple, it's safe.

For the people who purchase them, they are assuming the risks of mining. They take the risk that their machine will underperform, that their miners won't find any blocks, and that the value of the bitcoin will stay stable or increase. The people actually mining have much higher risk than the people just selling the equipment.

So, what I would do is pick a few passphrases that are long and cryptographically secure. Print these out and store them in a safety deposit box, bequeathing said box to whomever you want to give this information to.

From there, the linux command-line utility gpg will work nicely.

gpg -c filename

Will prompt for a passphrase twice (use one on your sheet), and output "filename.gpg" leaving filename still in tact.

From there, you can do whatever you want with the encrypted file--store it on a USB and put it in the safety deposit, email it, whatever. No one will be able to do anything with it until they have the passphrase.

The other way I'd do that, which is more of the day-to-day stuff, is create two bitmessage accounts and just send it via that.

PGP encrypted email is also a good way to go, so long as the recipient has their private key properly protected.

Your average GOP voter is the same as your average democrat voter, with different parents and geography. I have never, personally, met more than one republican that didn't like science, and she was a nut-job. Also, republican or democrat is not the dividing line for individual privacy. That's a non-partisan issue (unless you're libertarian, in which case it's your quest in life to remove all privacy violations). I was skeptical, at first, about targeted approaches generated from big-data problems. Then I got on google fiber. There were some HUGE privacy concerns there, since they basically keep a tcpdump (minus packet contents) of all your internet history as part of your google-fiber profile for 3 days. Before that, they just knew that I was an adult male. After being on google fiber, all my internet ads changed from gaming and porno to high end computer hardware and data center products. As it turns out, I greatly prefer seeing computer hardware ads (particularly when I'm at work). Targeted approaches bred from privacy violations aren't necessarily a bad thing, it's what people do with them that's the problem. Technologies can be used effectively to make the world a better place, or abused to make it worse, it doesn't mean the technology is inherently evil. I don't think democrats would have problem being data-mined and invited to public events surrounding global warming policy, and I doubt these GOP voters will care that they were selected by a computer to be invited to take part in something that they're interested in.