Now a thief needs to steal 3 of these to steal the coins. That's going to be hard for a thief to do. If a fire or natural disaster happens, it needs to destroy 3 wallets before I lose my money.
But it won't be perfectly executed. Let's say you need to do a transaction while you're moving house. And maybe one of your relatives is in financial trouble.
You (probably) don't have the means to do what banks do, and hire an armored transport.
Further, unlike an armored truck full of cash, security by obscurity is really easy here. That and for a short duration (say moving houses as you suggest) one could wipe a cold wallet clean and just remember a seed phrase. Personally, I don't have enough wealth to make this sort of maneuver at all worth it, but it's completely do-able.
Since then I don't believe in short SPOFs.
You could get hit in the head by a robber on your way moving your furniture, because the robber thinks you may be hauling high value stuff, and lose the passphrase. If you back it up on paper then the unguarded house may be broken into, and they steal the bag that had the paper passphrase.
Extremely unlikely that it'll happen to you, but extremely unlikely things happen all the time to someone.
3/5 multisig with collaborative custody would likely already be at least as safe as dollar checking accounts.
> 3/5 multisig with collaborative custody would likely already be at least as safe as dollar checking accounts.
I think that's off by orders of magnitude. If the whole US did this then I'd expect thousands to screw it up every year.
"Just don't make any mistake, ever" doesn't scale. Not to more people, and not to any one person, given enough time.
It's like running a yellow light (and the occasional red, when you thought it'd be yellow a bit longer). You can go your entire life never being in an accident. But there are accidents every day because people run yellow lights.
At this point we'd both need to go do extensive research at the levels of a full time job to really prove one way or the other.
Suffice it to say we disagree and you seem to have much more trust in institutions than I.
If we are all just taking these coins out of circulation to make them as hard as possible for anyone to access, including ourselves -- then what was the point of the entire thing again?
> But aren't we still pretending that crypto is a currency?
These are such smug comments.
> So this means anytime I actually want to spend some of my own money, I need to go to the bank deposit box and also find at least one friend to help me out?
No, it means you have options to fully secure and own crypto assets in a way dollar bills or bank accounts never allowed. You don't have to do it this way, but if you actually have wealth, you should protect the larger portion of it.
If you have $1000 worth of BTC, just carry it in a hot wallet.
If you have $10000 probably put $9000 in a cold wallet and $1000 in a hot wallet for spending.
If you have $100000, you should probably use 2/3 or 3/5 multisig with a collaborative custody company like unchained capital.
If you have another order of magnitude more money than that you probably know better than myself how to hold your wealth.
In any of these cases, you have full control. Nobody can move your BTC without your sign-off. Your capital cannot be rehypothecated.
So in response to your smug question, yes lock away in deep dark vaults your wealth should you have enough to care about. For daily spending walk around using your hot wallet.
Your comp sci oriented since you're on HN, so if that still doesn't satisfy you, then think of it using caching layers. Keep the bulk of your wealth (should you have enough to justify it) in an L1 deep cold storage, then another smaller chunk in L2 cold storage in a single wallet, and finally L3 in a hot wallet for daily spending.
Another way to view it is if you want anonymity and sovereignty over your dollar bills, you have no choice but to secure it yourself -- probably in a safe.
If you're willing to let someone be a dollar custodian (banker) in today's system, they'll only keep a fractional reserve and lend it out. In actuality today they have other more complicated (but lesser) reserve requirements and without the FDIC bank runs would be commonplace. There's then a whole discussion about the solidity of the FDIC and whether it may collapse.
Fractional reserve systems create the banking cycle and is why we have booms and busts. Ponzi's and fractional reserve systems in crypto are why the crypto market just boomed and busted. There are a small number of legitimate crypto currencies and they're value is tied to the illegitimate ones simply due to crypto-crypto liquidity vs crypto-fiat liquidity.
In this thread nobody is taking a holistic view of what BTC provides.
Even comments that say we're not talking about valuation.
The problem is valuation is part of the reason BTC matters. Sure, you can get custodial security in dollars, but they'll be devalued for banking and governmental purposes.
BTC is sound money that's actually easier to store and use than Gold/Silver. That to me is the way to view it.