Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

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> The USB in question would need military grade security

Which is widely available and effectively free.

> BTC is a fiat currency whose scarcity is determined by the actions of some random computer programmers who, for now, aren't leveraging that power for their own personal benefit

Statements like this are a sure sign of not actually understanding how Bitcoin works. There is no person or cartel in the world who could successfully unilaterally change the Bitcoin consensus rules.

> Gold is a natural element whose scarcity is a function of the laws of nature

The amount of gold we’ve mined compared to the amount of gold in nature (on earth, in asteroids, etc) is infinitesimal. The amount of Bitcoin we’ve mined is 89.5%.

> Which is widely available and effectively free

What? Who is going to fight off people trying to obtain or destroy that USB drive to increase the value of their own holdings (i.e. speed up deflation by reducing available bitcoin), or extract the passcode from its owner, for free?

EDIT: I realize this is the plot of Goldfinger, but the author did invoke Fort Knox, and the strategy of destroying stores of value to increase the worth of your own stash makes sense.

Who does it now?

I don't see how it follows that if bitcoin is useful that somehow militaries or rule of law can't exist.

> Who does it now?

France sent a warship to escort its gold from the US to France. Wasn't free, probably wasn't cheap.

Luckily you don't need a ship to transport bitcoin, you could use a telephone or TLS 1.3

Edit: or just keep your private key (which is best practice)

Conveniently, USB drives can be backed up.

Sure, but anyone holding that much wealth could expect some kind of "advanced persistent threat" working against them to either destroy all of the backups, or transfer the coins to /dev/null after extracting any passcode from the owner. The keys and anyone that knew how to use them would need a high level of physical security. The "costly militarized facilities" would still be necessary, contrary to the author's statement.

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