I honestly don't understand using a service to store bitcoins when a paper wallet using keypairs with offline-generated addresses is so readily available.
One of the aspects of Bitcoin that gives it value is cutting out third parties for storage.
One of the aspects of Bitcoin that gives it value is cutting out third parties for storage.
I honestly don't understand using a bank to store dollars when using a wallet is so readily available.
Do you not see the flaw in your thinking? People with large amounts of money don't want the responsibility of securing their own money themselves. Storing Bitcoin's despite what people may say, is not trivial for the average person.
Perhaps people should get up to speed before using Bitcoin unless they want to lose their money. Storing btc with a third party is a great way to lose them.
"Use Linux! Windoze is insecure!" they said.
Right.
How much did you lose (if you don't mind saying)?
How long was it before you noticed?
Do you think you were (a) individually targeted as a BTC holder, or (b) do you think someone was port scanning the Internet and stumbled onto you?
If (a), how did they know you might have BTC? If (b), is it actually commonplace for automated attacks to seek BTC wallets these days?
Most of the publicity centered around trojan miner applications, but the same issue also exposed the entire file system. So, searching the exposed file systems for wallet.dat files was a trivial and obvious free lunch for the crackers, much more so than mining.
In retrospect, I think the biggest mistake was using the same port for things like the security camera server that is used for remote administration. Taking the time to learn how to use a nonstandard port would probably have kept this particular system safe. I can't blame Synology, really... just a bad threat assessment on my part. My thinking was that keeping the wallet.dat file off of any Internet-accessible Windows boxes would provide enough "security by obscurity," but we all know how that story usually ends.
Bitcoin isn't ready for prime time, agreed. But it's still here.