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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

One million dollars in $100 bills is 10,000 bills. A bill is 0.010922 cm in thickness. That would be 109.2 cm. That would be a stack of bills just over 3 1/2 feet high if you made a single stack. You could probably fit a million bucks in a decent sized brief case and could definitely fit it inside a duffle bag. It doesn't take dump-trucks to steal a million bucks.

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Sure, but at MtGox, the theft was 477 millions.

http://news.yahoo.com/mtgox-opens-call-centre-500m-bitcoin-l...

That's a lot of duffle bags to haul.

In addition to what petit_robert pointed out about the Mt. Gox theft being orders of magnitude larger, you're assuming the densest available US currency and that it's conveniently pre-packaged for easy shipment.

What we're actually talking about, however, is like being able to teleport into a bank anywhere in the world, wave a magic wand which converts everything on the premises into tightly packaged $100 bills, and teleporting back out of the country. In the real world, running out the door with a bunch of duffel bags and people shouting tends to attract a lot of attention and make escape a lot harder than closing a network connection.

I fail to see how 99% of USD, which are just records in a database, is different than bitcoins in that regard then. The failure I would argue is in the original analogy of taking physical money to begin with.

Because electronic money transactions are reversible. If you can convince the right people that a transaction was illegitimate, it can be reversed and you can be made whole.

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