>I'm willing to bet that I have more protection securing the contents of my Bitcoin Wallet than Wells Fargo has protecting my account at any level.
Would you say this is true for most users?
Would you say this is true for most users?
It's not that hard to provide people with a secure environment, as long as that environment is designed with with security in mind. A non-jailbroken smartphone is probably good enough, though a dedicated device might be better. And you can use live boots.
I can see a future where we use such (or similar) things to do money transfers.
* How does bitcoin storage work with offsite backups? If someone compromised the backup, would that give them access to your money?
* If you lose the file (hard drive crash, home burns down, backup system fails, whatever), does neither you nor anyone else have that money anymore? I.e., someone wouldn't have to gain access to the money themselves to deprive you of it?
there are also ways of generating bitcoin keys completely offline as well as producing signed valid bitcoin transactions completely offline. This way you can forward funds to keys that are not on a machine connected to the internet, or keys that are backed up only on paper (in multiple safety deposit boxes if you like). And also you can then put signed transactions from the offline machine onto a usb stick or whatever and then use a networked machine to forward those valid transactions to the bitcoin network.
Coinbase is doing something like this for their storage of customer funds. Coinbase seeks to be a bitcoin bank that wont get hacked or that if it somehow does get hacked (cough inside job, cough) that only very small losses could occur.
http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/
For example, Bitfloor (which had 250K USD stolen): http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/from/bitfloor/
Verses Coinbase, which has no such history: http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/from/coinbase/
To be sure, I'm not advocating that my parents start using BitCoins. I just tire of this implication that somehow USD is, by virtue of being USD, automagically more secure than Bitcoins.
Armchair loud mouths (I have one in mind who went into hiding after trolling HN repeatedly) stop by for months following an online wallet incursion to tell us how stupid Bitcoin and Bitcoin users are.