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Comment by PhilWright | Hacker News Reader

And this is why Bitcoin is doomed to fail as a genuine currency. Imagine if your bank said they had lost your money and tough luck on you. Or you bank emails you to say they have been hacked and all your money is gone. Or the bank just disappears offline and your money is gone. Or you forget a password and so your bank says sorry, but that means all your money is gone forever.

Great system.

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Apples and oranges. Your bank doesn't issue currency. Your bank could accept bitcoin and run nearly the same as it runs today.

Except that you wouldn't get much legal protection if someone runs off with your bitcoin. A bitcoin transaction is irreversible and unfreezable, so there is not a lot the bank or legal system can do to try and retrieve stolen funds. And there is less of a trace to who the thief is.

As a result you probably aren't going to get the government failure guarantees on bitcoin as you would for fiat. Let alone governments wont want you using a different currency that they can't print.

FWIW banks couldn't operate without at least one mode of "irreversible and unfreezable" currency transactions, aka fed wire transfers.

No one can "freeze" cash, either, which is what currency is. A number in a bank account can represent us dollars, bitcoin or whatever else. You're talking about two different things here.

I agree with your point about government failure guarantees, however.

I was talking about money in a bank account (i.e. an electronic record of a bank's liability to it's customer), rather than cash.

Bitcoin works more like SouthPark Bank: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Maa0K4ycASo

If you can protect your nude photos from getting on the net, you can protect your private key from getting on the net. Browsing the internet used to require the command line.

The only way to protect it is to not have it on a computer that is connected to the internet. There are schemes involving throwing dice to generate a key, writing it on paper, using a python script or suchlike to generate an address from the dice throws etc. Something like that would be pretty secure, as long as no one breaks in to your house to get the key (or you can remember it).

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