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Comment by cup-of-tea | Hacker News Reader

Not surprising, actually. Gold is very easy to keep locked away because it's a physical object. But that also means it's very difficult to move around. As with all things, there are tradeoffs and one must decide what is best for each. Even if the "15x" figure is true, there might still be a use case for Bitcoin.

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Why can't you lock away your bitcoin keys with the same degree of care you use to lock away your gold, but at a fraction of the size?

You can, and Coinbase and other competent exchanges do. You can also store the keys redundantly and apply cryptographic as well as physical protections.

Because locking is just half of the problem.

A thief in a gold vault still has to carry the gold out, and that is difficult.

A thief in a vault with a bitcoin wallet just needs to write the private keys/seeds on a piece of paper (yes, I know about secret sharing schemes)

So bitcoin is much more vulnerable to a single person who fucks up or is malicious.

2 of 3 multisig. Now the thief has to compromise two sites, at the same time.

Or password protect the seed.

Or both.

Still easier than carting away thousands of pounds of gold without getting caught.

You have to put a lot more care into locking away keys. Locking away gold is easy. You just lock it away. Keys have to be properly generated with no other copies that could be compromised and printed on archival quality paper in a fireproof safe. And even then, a key only has to be compromised, not physically removed. Two of three multisig, while clever, means you now need three locations instead of one, and you might not even know that the first key was compromised. But this probably only boils down to the fact that we've got pretty good at storing gold by now. I don't think Bitcoin is any easier to store, though.

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