Hacker Redirects Traffic From 19 Internet Providers to Steal Bitcoins

With Bitcoin, every marginal theft adds 100% to the total Bitcoin thefts.

If your private key is compromised, the thief takes your entire balance, and there's nothing you can do about it. So you really want to keep it safe.

Lose your private key, lose everything it was protecting. So keeping the key in only one place, and one place where only you can access, is a big problem. There is nobody out there to give access to your money if you pass away. A hardware failure can be catastrophic.

The problem is that everything that makes the private key survive accidents makes it easier to hack. The way we treat something like this in a corporation is with things like shared secrets: Need 3 out of 5 people to use their issued keys so that the real private key protecting everything is revealed. And even with that level of effort, getting the key is still possible with enough effort.

The nice thing is, security breaches in a decentralized network like bitcoin serve to make the entire network anti-fragile. There's a huge incentive for people with bitcoin to secure their own bitcoins against known exploits and hence make that exploit null while inevitably protecting against similar class exploits.

Much like early immigrants to North America who had leaving the stability and safety of UK/European banks for an emerging market and/or the Wild West.