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Comment by gonvaled | Hacker News Reader

Whoever trusts an exchange as depositor is doing so at their own risk: your bitcoins are not really yours (technically) unless you have them in your wallet, preferably a cold wallet.

All these breaches do not show any weakness of blockchain security.

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Maybe if your digital currency depends on printing out private keys and storing them in bank vaults in order to be secure, its security model is kinda shitty? Why should secure digital currency be 100x more cumbersome to use than a credit card?

The "security model" for the current method of payment in the United States involves getting breached left and right, getting 97 years of credit report monitoring, constant reissuance of cards, and refunding fraudulent charges sometimes as late as 30 days after the fact.

BTC happens to be worse currently, but not by that much.

EDIT: Also, this is the same model as PGP/GPG and priv/pub key protection. Presumably you don't think this security model is shitty for the myriad of uses it sees.

Paper wallets are just one possibility for true paranoids expecting to keep the coins for an indefinite time. A more common usage is hardware wallets, which the key is supposed to never leaves the device, combining some cool logical and physical security to ensure that.

Are we sure we're not just re-inventing paper currency?

Contrast this to banks, where your money is much safer that in your mattress.

Depends on which country's banks. So far I've lost more money to banks in my country than to my mattress, and so has almost everyone in Uruguay and Argentina:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito

Funds were forcibly converted to worthless bonds.

That was the same commentary 2316 days ago too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2828445

Yep, because for the largest group of people it is substantially more convenient... even on the point of security, because they couldn't keep it safe either. Of course both are vulnerabilities.

Somewhere I had 7 BTC on a flash drive. Haven't seen it in years... maybe I'll find it one day.

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