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Comment by leereeves | Hacker News Reader

Hard to steal at gunpoint? Who is going to refuse to hand over their keys when the choice is "Your Bitcoin keys or your life"?

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"Here is my 'checking' wallet. The key to my paper 'savings' wallet are in bank XYZ's vault, care to come get them with me?"

That's about the security of bank vaults, not Bitcoin. Fiat savings (or gold, diamonds, whatever) stored in the bank vault would be just as hard to steal.

May I introduce you to the $5 wrench method?

https://xkcd.com/538/

Irrelevant because I cannot (a) give the content of the vault from memory to save my life or (b) enter the vault accompanied (so there's an opportunity to alert bank personnel that I am under duress). Well "irrelevant" to the safety of the wallet at least, not of my squishy bits.

Sure. I can hand you a handful of USB sticks about 20 paper wallets maybe a hard disk or two...and tell you, here are my keys. Now what you do? Do you put down your gun and start verifying which one is with actual funds or, do you know what is a usb drive and what is a hw wallet? Are you gonna ask me for my password too. How do you know you actually stole something worthwhile? How do you know I am not going to be faster transferring the coins to different wallets?

All that is vs. "show me gold, shiny ohh heavy".

You see the levels of complications....

A million dollar heist typically involves more than one individual. One person holds the gun the other handles moving and verifying the funds.

I'd sit there with you and transfer them through some tumblers. I'd have brought a laptop and set aside time, and will threaten you on your life if you slow down or refuse.

It only sounds hard if you assume I'd take an unreasoanbly incompetent approach. It's like "rape is impossible because a women with her skirt up runs faster than a man with his pants down".

To be fair, because it is so easy to hand over access to crypto wallets vs a bank account (your bank will reverse fraudulent transactions) it would actually be possible to hand the robber a bait wallet with a small fraction of your net worth but enough to keep the robber happy.

If the criminal is sophisticated enough to target cryptocurrency holdings, they'll probably transfer the coins to their own wallets right there on the crime scene. Exchanges won't help either: they can simply force their victims to log in and withdraw the money.

This also happens with traditional banks where I live. People are kidnapped and taken to ATMs where their accounts are drained.

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