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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

The intention of bitcoin was to have a digital medium with similar properties as cash: no need to trust anyone else, and you can exchange it with whoever you want. Cash can also be stolen if someone takes your wallet, leaving you no recourse except the law

Imho Bitcoins being stolen is not at all Bitcoin being "bent, broken, or subverted", it's just a natural consequence of the design goals. If an unrelated third party could block my bitcoins by accusing me of terrorism that would be subverting the system, and such things have not happened to bitcoin-core (but have happened in other parts of the bitcoin ecosystem)

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> Cash can also be stolen if someone takes your wallet, leaving you no recourse except the law

The issue that is often raised with Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies is that not even the law can help you in case of theft. Now, it's true that the police wouldn't bother helping me recover a wallet with 100€ into it, but things change if someone steals millions or even billions like in this case.

You steal billions, you just pay the police 100000000 to look away.

At risk of finding an honest cop that arrests you on the spot for attempted bribing.

You don’t go to the cop. You go to his politically elected boss.

Which now has a choice between getting a lot of money illegally or boosting their career legally.

Most people don't carry their entire finance in wallet tho. If someone steals my wallet and CC PIN, the most I'm out is the few thousands of limit on those, not my entire financial portfolio.

Which is why it’s common to have a “hot” key with maybe a few hundred bucks and a “cold” key with the larger deposit

Ok, so you are saying this is business as usual, and the theft is exactly what one should expect, as with any other store of value.

I find something odd about this, because it seems to contradict some of what I understand of the arguments for bitcoin.

However, there is merit to your point, and if something is working as intended, then nothing was attacked in the first place.

The argument for bitcoin being secure is more along the lines of "if you store your own bitcoins securely nobody can take them from you". Storing them securely is easy in principle (just keep them on an airgapped computer, or write the key down on paper, then "just" do physical security well) but hard in practice (major security-convenience tradeoffs). However, storing your bitcoins with a major provider like binance has a terrible track record and not something the hardcore bitcoin advocates actually recommend

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