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Comment by tudorizer | Hacker News Reader

Quite a long time to go, but that's ok. How quick did such a mother adopt credit-cards?

Bitcoin needs more security than credit cards because transactions are irreversible. Say his mother has a significant part of her savings in BTC, and they get stolen. What's she gonna do then?

Cash needs more security than credit cards because transactions are irreversible. Say his mother has a significant part of her savings in cash, and they get stolen. What's she gonna do then?

Answer: let a bank deal with it. Banks can be insured.

For physical cash, banks don't give a hoot, and their insurance doesn't either, because the sums stolen are so small.

Even the dollars a bank has uninvested, they are stored electronically, and it's very easy to undo electronic transactions. Plus, the limiting factor on stealing electronic money from banks is finding a stool pigeon who will do it with cash.[1]

With a system where transactions cannot be undone, you need life-or-death-level security on the entire holdings. No insurance company is going to underwrite a policy of "there is a completely unknown chance of 100% loss."

[1] A PDF of this was on HN recently but apparently I did not bookmark it. Help a brother out?

Here is the paper: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1618...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but BTC banks can be attacked just like normal banks by the very central authorities we are trying to be safe from. Eg: "Oh noes, our economy is doing terrible, so much public debt. Let's just steal from the people.". Sure, they can't use inflation, but that's not the only way.

Credit card transactions only appear to be reversible to the end user. If someone nicks your credit card and buys some gas, it may appear to you that the money just came back but someone in the chain (usually the gas station) is eating that cost.

So the only functional difference between bitcoin and a credit card in this respect is that there's someone big (the bank) sitting in between you and the transaction that has enough clout to force the loss off you and onto someone else. If a bank decided to build a bitcoin payment system, and signed merchants to a contract similar to the one they do on credit cards, there would be no functional difference from the consumer's standpoint.

The money lost to someone buying some gas is minimal.

Transactions are completely reversible until someone involves physical goods, including cash. The system can deal with tiny levels of fraud. With Bitcoin, someone can do a complete transfer of my life savings in an instant, and then what?

If a hacker manages to get into your online bank account and transfer everything out, you're still out of luck unless the bank decides to cover it for you. As far as I know, unless the bank catches it before a transfer is made (which they very well might with fraud detection), they don't necessarily have any means to reverse the transaction after it hits the hackers account. I don't really have any deep experience with that side of banking so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but in my limited experience I've seen that once money leaves your account it's only reversible in the sense that the bank may decide to cover the loss for you. There might be some tiny window to reverse things, but I don't think it's a terribly large one.

For personal banking in America, there are almost assuredly laws that say it's the bank's responsibility. (Note that the rules are different for businesses.)

I'm still trying to find the reference I mentioned yesterday, the gist of which was that personal banking theft is limited by the number of cash mules who can be recruited. Krebs[1] has many articles about money mules that I hope will lead me to it.

EDIT I found it! [2] "Federal Reserve Regulation E guarantees that US consumers are made whole when their bank passwords are stolen."

[1] http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/01/top-10-ways-to-get-fired-...

[2] Is Everything We Know About Password-Stealing Wrong? http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1618...

I replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5511715

That's a valid point. People are missing the fact that Bitcoin is just the underlaying currency. Exactly like cash. Cash can be stolen if stored in your house. That's why banks exist. In Bitcoin-land banks will not look and behave like banks do in the current world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com