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> "I'm not sure what Bitcoin equivalent of "leaving cash on the street" you're inferring. It might be helpful if you elaborated on that."

Bitcoins are a form of digital cash.

You store Bitcoins in a wallet. If you lose your Bitcoin wallet you lose your bitcoins. In a similar sense, if you lose your wallet containing notes/coins, you lose your notes/coins. The security risk is the same.

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The security risk is not remotely the same because in order to do anything other that store your Bitcoins (e.g. spend, transfer), you have to expose your money online. My dollar bills are never out there on the internet, so my only risk of loss is physical loss or physical theft.

Because of this, it's better to compare Bitcoin to other forms of "digital/virtual representations of currency", like debit cards and credit cards. And that's where Bitcoin's mass-adoption-type use-cases tend to fall apart.

You have the option to use a physical bitcoin wallet, you don't need to have your bitcoins constantly exposed to hackers over the internet.

But the digital form of bitcoin change things. A good hacker might check for thousands of computer a day to find private keys but he can't walk along kilometers to find coins on the ground.

Don't expose them to hackers then, keep your bitcoin wallet away from the Internet until you want to use it.

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