Hacker News Reader

Comment by asperous | Hacker News Reader

Well you're making the assumption that people can protect their wallets better than a bank.

I hope I'm not making a crazy statement to say that people in general aren't that great at security. Unless you have the wisdom to keep your wallets offline or secured with a password longer than 20+ (or whatever) charactes, it's only a matter of time before a worm or virus gathers up hundreds of insecure wallets.

Secondly, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with banks. Banks help the supply of money and keep economies going through investment. Banks can build green addresses for instant purchases which Bitcoin needs to be successful.

Bitcoin wasn't designed to get rid of banks. Bitcoin was designed to give banks and people a common way of transferring money without expensive accounting auditing, secret protocols, and government centralization.

View on HN

In addition to worms and viruses, consider the risk of good old fashioned data loss. Everyone knows they should back up their hard-drive but many (if not most) users do a piss-poor job of it. Storing your bitcoins online somewhere increases the risk they'll be compromised by an online attacker, but it reduces the risk that you'll lose everything in a fire.

I keep my wallet.dat in Dropbox. It's versioned and they have 2 factor authentication. I also trust their security more (they have a dedicated security team: https://www.dropbox.com/help/27/en) than some John Doe on a Bitcoin forum.

Just use online wallets as your hot wallet and keep most your coins offline.

People who've kept their wallets in Dropbox have found them mysteriously emptied in the past, from what I recall.

I would argue your wallet.dat should't be accessible from the internet all the time to begin with just put it on a old USB stick that you can store in a safe place.

If you're worried it can disappear in a fire you can always make a copy of it put it on another USB stick and give it to your grandma or other trusted person.

If you are paranoid you can always just encrypt the file before saving it on the USB stick.

Treating them like the keys to your house should offer more security than any bank can give you. For one thing it makes it less profitable for any thief to target you.

There's only 1 problem with this. You should always check the computer you're about to load your wallet file into for malicious software.

Although I would argue a live CD with a Linux distro would probably be the best choice in this case. Quickly transfer some funds to your regular use account if you need while keeping the bulk of your funds in a safe place.

That was pre-2-factor authentication if I recall correctly.

As someone who works for a bank I can say with some confidence that the only thing protecting your funds is the fact that transactions are reversable and insured.

I would not trust a bank with my bitcoins.

I agree that Bitcoin banks would need insurance to be successful. As it is, it's pretty much just giving them to a anonymous stranger over the internet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com