Guy accidentily deletes Bitcoin wallet with $8000 worth of Bitcoin in it | Hacker News Reader

Guy accidentily deletes Bitcoin wallet with $8000 worth of Bitcoin in it

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6 pointstinco8 comments

This reminds me of what my mom asked me after hearing about bitcoin for the first time:

"Well, if the the money is stored on your computer, doesn't that mean that anyone who controls your computer controls the money?" (Paraphrasing, that was the gist of it.)

To which I gave an emphatic yes. I also pointed out that if you store your credit card details on your computer, whoever controls your computer controls your credit card. Though at least with that theres some amount of insurance against fraud.

I'm not an expert on the matter, but to be fair there are lots of things you can do to secure your wallet. Some of them are even discussed in that thread.

There is only one way that is close to being fully secure and that is what the guy who lost his money did. Have your bitcoin wallet on a bootable linux usb stick that you only use for bitcoin transactions.

Why not encrypt your wallet and back it up?

Because that's not secure, it's just a nightmare waiting to happen.

How is it not secure to do that, assuming you have a sufficiently long decryption key? It seems more secure than what than having $8k on a single drive that can easily fail at any time.

Because anyone who has root on your device can just monitor your keypresses. It doesn't matter how long your decryption key is. Ofcourse storing it on a single drive isn't a good idea either :)

Technical correction, "protection against fraud." Or perhaps "assurance" would also work here.

"Once you report the loss of your ATM or debit card, federal law says you cannot be held liable for unauthorized transfers that occur after that time."

If you report within 2 business days after you learn about the loss or theft then your liability is only $50. It's $500 if you report it within 60 days.

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