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Comment by PostOnce | Hacker News Reader

You know what else is great about it? The money is stored as a file on your computer. I can steal it from my laptop from the park across the street from your house and be gone before you know its missing, and you will never, ever be able to find me. All I have to do is steal your wallet file and transfer the bitcoins to my account, and the money is irreversibly mine.

Computer security being what it is, and with bitcoin growing at the rate you claim it is, I may soon be a millionaire without having done any real work.

Welcome to the future.

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How will you do that? I don't even have wireless.

Jokes aside, the current financial system has the exact same problems, and infact can be worse, especially with username:password based authentication. If someone skims your ATM card and gets your pin number too bad, you've lost the money.

Or you could have your wallet pickpocketed, and the thief would be gone without you even knowing the money was missing.

What about credit cards? Protect consumers with chargebacks? yes. However these same consumer protections also hurt merchants, who are the ones that pay for chargebacks and frauds. Because there are no chargebacks bitcoin is very attractive to online merchants.

If users are not comfortable being responsible for taking care of their btcoins they can always use the bitcoin banking services like mybitcoin.com

Fact is bitcoin is money, clever thieves will be able to find clever ways of stealing money, it's been happening since money has been happening.

If you're looking for a perfectly secure currency don't hold your breath, cause one hasn't been invented yet and isn't likely any time soon.

Bitcoin banks negate true anonymity, the govt can contact the bank and ask for acct details, so they are worse than regular banks, being uninsured, unregulated, and unsecured. Also, real banks have men with guns (not to mention the capability to summon heavily-armed police officers on very short notice) to protect them. Neither your computer nor your bitcoin bank is 1] stored in a vault or 2] protected by armed guards.

With that said, if you want anonymity, you don't use a bitcoin bank. Which means you store ALL your money on your computer, probably. Who carries ALL their money in their wallet? No-one.

ATM cards have various protections built into them, pin number, fraud protection, withdrawal limit, the fact that people keep them on their person and know to protect them, etc.

You can't steal an ATM card from 200 feet away without someone knowing about it.

It's also relatively hard to pickpocket people. You have to be right next to them.

The first bitcoin-stealing virus is going to be downright hilarious. (What's your physical analogy there? Someone could build a network of tiny robots and have them covertly steal cash from banks? It's theoretically possible.)

>the govt can contact the bank and ask for acct details

And the bank, being a website(quite possibly based outside the government in questions reach) can ignore them. And that's if the "banks" really have any information about you besides your username and password.

>they are worse than regular banks, being uninsured, unregulated, and unsecured.

Why would a website(aka, the bitcoin bank) that stores a few bits, information(which is what bitcoins are, information) need to be insured, or secured(apart from backups). And being unregulated is a good thing, it allows the "bank" to provide the services their customers want.

You do know that the reasons real banks have all these things is because they don't have all the money their depositors think they have right?

> Also, real banks have men with guns (not to mention the capability to summon heavily-armed police officers on very short notice) to protect them.

Because the criminals will "break" into your bitcoin "bank" with guns and steal your bitcoins... at gunpoint? What? Have you even read what you wrote?

Encrypt the hardrive, and not even the might of the Soviet Army can get those bitcoins. Are you truely that stupid? Really?

I don't know what else to say.

Depending on the country, maybe. Every website is hosted somewhere, though.

The reason a bitcoin bank needs to be insured and secured is so that someone doesn't gingerly walk in, pick the computer up, and take off with $40,000,000 of your customers' money. Part of the point of a bank is security. That's why people who earn no interest don't keep large sums of cash in their homes.

And yes, using a gun to force someone to give you a computer with $40,000,000 in it is likely to happen. Clearly, I have read and understood what I wrote. Have you?

You can encrypt a hard drive, sure, but do you? If the bitcoin bank isn't regulated, they don't have to encrypt their drives. Depending on the encryption, the same gun they use to steal the computer can be used to force you to give passwords. Or they can eavesdrop on you, or the account holder, or both, or an infinite variety of other things that I am not going to go into.

I'm done with this argument; you are trolling.

Invisible hand of the free market my friend.

If a bank lets a thief get away with an unencrypted harddrive full of bitcoins who is going to ever use them again?.

Bitcoin is a strange concept, I am not convinced it will take off but the potential is amazing.

Sure online banking has risks. But do you imagine the cash in the vault at your local bank branch has anything whatever to do with your deposits at that bank? Regular banks use computers too. Police and guns (physical security) have nothing whatsoever to do with security differences between bricks-and-mortar banks and online ones.

I am talking about the security of banks (online and physical) vs. your average windows PC. It is a LOT more likely that you will have bitcoins stolen from your PC than all the cash from your bank account, assuming bitcoin were as ubiquitous as bank accounts.

In fact, let's put it this way: to steal all the bitcoins from my non-techie friend's PC is going to be much easier and less traceable than stealing all the cash from his bank account.

While the current financial system does suffer from many of the same problems, the difference is that there is a sophisticated infrastructure that exists to combat this behavior in these cases. Law enforcement, security services, intelligence agencies, government regulators, bank and credit card employees and insurance companies, among others, all work every day to mitigate these risks on behalf of their respective systems.

And you don't think anyone in the bitcoin world is working on the same thing?

>the difference is that their a sophisticated infrastructure that exists to combat....

Infrastructure becomes moot when it's too "sophisticated" for granny(or me,I mean really, how often haveI lost my online banking key fob? or I have to enter an endless string of numbers just to see my balance?) to use.

And besides, we have the "sophisticated" infrastructure of cryptography on our side. The only real way around this is with social engineering, to which the current financial system is equally vulnerable.

With regards to the "authorities" you list see here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387022, I find it hard to imagine that the CIA is worried or working on the problem of Nigerians or Russians trying to scam people, or helping people who are victims.

While I find it difficult to believe you don't actually understand what I was saying, I will clarify.

The basic difference is that if someone manages to steal $1000USD from my bank account, the overwhelming odds are that I'll get it back, if for no other reason than my bank will cover it. If someone steals 1000BTC from my wallet, the odds are vanishingly small that I'll ever recover it.

Clearly the CIA isn't acting directly on behalf of your grandmother if someone steals her credit card, but then again local law enforcement isn't acting to derail sophisticated electronic attacks against the international banking system. Never the less, they both have their roles that they play in protecting the financial system over all.

>if someone manages to steal $1000USD from my bank account, the overwhelming odds are that I'll get it back, if for no other reason than my bank will cover it.

That all depends on how they stole it. If they skimmed your ATM card and got the pin then they have the money, and it's gone, and your bank won't give it back(you're supposed to keep the PIN secret remember), and the police can do nothing. The overwhelming odds are that your money, once gone is gone for good.

Also people don't steal bitcoins from your wallet, maybe they can steal the wallet itself but not the bitcoins from the wallet, and if that wallet is encrypted then good luck with that.

What about storing Bitcoins in "the cloud" (effectively becoming a bank)?

Or even something like Dropbox, especially if the drive becomes password-encrypted without internet and there's a remote-disconnect feature when online.

Which is somehow different than owning someone's computer that has a traditional bank account that they check online?

If you access to their financial info, you can steal money. Just because it is digital doesn't make it magical.

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