Comment by PostOnce | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PostOnce | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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