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Comment by danmaz74 | Hacker News Reader

> It requires human intervention to access the cold wallet (to replenish the internet-facing "hot" wallet), but that is what you want!

Am I the only one who finds it a bit amusing that an e-currency bank needs people to physically move the bullion from one vault to the other?

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On the contrary, I think it's pretty neat you can implement a variety of security schemes depending on your risk tolerance and convienence requirements.

Some of the parameters you can pick from:online vs offline ("cold"), hosted vs not, SPV vs full node, multisig, dedicated hardware wallet, etc.

And you can combine them in various permutations: e.x. offline + multisig is just about the most secure thing you can imagine.

>I think it's pretty neat you can implement a variety of security schemes depending on your risk tolerance and convienence requirements.

Can you tell me the last time some you know had money go missing from their bank account?

Lots of people lose money because of scams, cards getting stolen/scanned/photographed, etc. - in a lot of cases, the banks just cover the cost and can rollback transactions because everyone has agreed that's how the system works. It is not because people do not have money stolen from their bank accounts due to various breaches.

My understanding might be wrong, but I believe during the 2013 Cyprus bail-in, all Cypriot depositors had money missing from their bank accounts: they lost 9.9% of funds above the insurance ceiling, 6.75% of funds below the ceiling:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2013/03/cyprus-bai...

Airgaps are standard fare in very high security environments, e-currency is no different in this respect if the amounts get high enough.

That's a serious problem. Controlling access to the vault, when it's being accessed frequently, is hard. It's even harder for Bitcoin, where the threat is someone copying the data. You can have your original data and not have the assets it represented.

Question to ask Bitcoin exchanges: are your people bonded, and who's the bonding company. If they answer "What?", they're clueless about vault operations.

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