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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

shrug

Some people certainly do: https://twitter.com/search?q=just%20bought%20coinbase&src=ty...

I agree it's not ideal, but if your security relied on a guessable email address staying private, you're already not in a good place.

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Because "well someone else does it" has always been the best reason to behave a certain way...

No, and indeed I don't publish whether or not I have a coinbase account. But it isn't a serious security failure if that somehow got out.

Except for the non-zero possibility it could make the difference between you being murdered during a home invasion, or not.

Last time a politician was worried about non-zero probabilities, the U.S. invaded Iraq. I mean, if changing the probability someone's home gets broken into is our standard of practice nowadays there's a lot of companies which will have to close down today.

I reckon non-anonymous bitcoin holders are at greater risk than the average person with money in the bank, since draining the account of the former is a relative cinch once the keys are divulged. The whole crime could be completed within a few minutes.

That much may be true, but I'd consider that an inherent risk associated with using Bitcoin without using a pseudonym. Maybe I'm naïve but I have to assume people who care about such things are already tracking IP addresses directly from the Bitcoin network swarm itself for later investigation...

Likely Coinbase customers expected Coinbase to keep their real name secure from potential thieves. But they thought wrongly.

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