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Comment by snitko | Hacker News Reader

Technical problems resulting in people losing money happen all the time outside of the Bitcoin economy. In fact, the way these recent events were handled by Bitcoin developers and the community are way more encouraging than, say, actions taken by Visa after someone supposedly stolen a million credit card numbers.

So, philosophically speaking, Bitcoin encourages people to start thinking about being more responsible about their money safety (which they anyway have to do, regardless of what they use, Bitcoin or a bank), at the same time providing a much better way to perform transactions and save for the future.

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Sure technical problems happen all the time. But there are tens/hundreds of thousands of engineers/testers across the world who get paid very well to fix them. Bitcoin doesn't have that sort of infrastructure. And if you are responsible about money safety then putting your money into Bitcoin is pretty stupid. Banks around the world insure credit card losses for any fraudulent transactions.

Your logic is slightly wrong. When a project is opensourced and popular, odds are you actually have more engineers looking at it and fixing things, than when you have isolated teams working on software for each individual bank. And that's not even talking about testers.

Then you also are paying much higher fees for what is supposed to be more safety. These fees come in various forms: government taxes, inflation, transaction fees.

Insurance in any form is never a good deal, actuarially -- the house always wins. What insurance is, is a way to trade a non-zero risk of ruin (someone steals all your bitcoin and you are broke) for a zero risk of ruin and a guaranteed risk of a small loss (someone steals your credit card number and you are not liable, but you pay 2% of every transaction).

Most people will take this trade all day, every day -- and they are not wrong to do so. It's a valid decision to pay for predictability.

There's nothing out there that prevents companies to create Bitcoin services to store and insure your savings for you. I believe they will inevitably emerge as the Bitcoin economy grows.

Already happening: http://bitcoinmagazine.com/coinlab-bringing-bitcoin-to-wall-...

They are working with some major Wall St insurers to insure and store large quantities of btc.

There's every reason to believe the infrastructure will grow as needed. Where there's money, there's people solving problems to make sure it keeps flowing.

Actually, one of the reasons I'm so bullish about Bitcoin in the long run is the experience and maturity of most members of the main dev team. Yes, it's only about 6 core devs now, but that will grow as bitcoins market cap increases (presumably). The recent block chain split (a Bitcoin emergency if there ever was one) was handled so quickly and decisively by the core devs that the price remained relatively stable. That's pretty amazing.

I was impressed by how small the price change was as a result of this blockchain split - it gives me a lot more confidence in the future of Bitcoin. Mt. Gox saw a selloff and price drop of about 20%, which was mostly stabilized in a day, and about back to the starting price in 2. All of the other exchanges look about the same or less severe.

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