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Comment by jaysonelliot | Hacker News Reader

If you lose your wallet, you lose your bitcoins. This means that losing data from your hard drive is equivalent to losing your bank account.

I get the idea that people ought to back up regularly, but look at the reality of the situation. How many times have you heard a friend or relative bemoan the loss of important photos or files because they didn't back up their computer?

I assume that the eventual goal of bitcoin is to be accepted by the mainstream public. Unless I'm misunderstanding something (which is entirely possible), we'd be asking people to accept the idea that their money is only as safe as the data on their hard drive.

Do I have this all wrong?

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If you lose your wallet, you lose your cash.

That does not mean cash is unworkable, that only means people will learn to keep their money in a safe place. Might take some time, but they'll learn all the same.

I only carry a small amount of cash at any time. If bitcoin is only as secure as cash, then no one will maintain any more bitcoin currency than a few hundred dollars.

It would be irresponsible to entrust tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to the integrity of your hard drive and its backup(s).

Or is bitcoin not meant to become a currency that people would hold in values larger than a few hundred dollars?

See, you learned! You learned not to store all your cash in one place (on your person, or in your home). Surely you will also learn to store or bitcoin stash in an appropriate electronic analogue of the safe deposit box. Like dropbox, only with real encryption.

Are you saying that you would keep the bitcoin equivalent of, say, USD$100,000 in this hypothetical secure location?

For bitcoin to become a viable alternative currency, everyone's wallet needs to be distributed as widely as a torrent file, and secure enough that only the owner can ever open it.

Sure. I would store it encrypted in the cloud, and I would give the copy of the key to my trusted friends, relatives,my lawyer, and my accountant.

Better yet, I would give halves of the key to all those people, with some redundancy.

I think this is a great idea for bitcoin startup, especially generating halves of encryption keys.

A common strategy is to keep a separate secure "Savings Wallet".

Here's one way to do it:

Make a new wallet with a receiving address you note down somewhere, compress/encrypt the wallet file with the strongest password you'll remember, shred evidence of the unencrypted file, put the encrypted file on a few USB sticks, and hide them. You can put one in a safety deposit box, if you wish.

Now this is the beauty of Bitcoin:

You can continue sending money to the receiving address of your Savings Wallet without ever opening it and firing it up. Someday, perhaps after the financial apocalypse, you can decrypt your wallet file, open it, and your client will start downloading all the transaction history from your peers which will eventually accumulate all the savings you've sent to it. Then, you can start spending them.

> people will learn to keep their money in a safe place.

Like a bank!

So use mybitcoin.com then.

Or another 3rd party you trust.

And what happens if mybitcoin or whatever third party proves itself untrustworthy?

I can't see myself trusting any unregulated, unsecured entity with any significant amount of my personal wealth.

Who regulates the Federal Reserve?

You trust the SEC to secure your wealth?

It's a lot easier to go to the SEC offices (or the offices of our elected reps who appointed them) with pitchforks than it is to get to the folks running mybitcoin.

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