It seems to me that Bitcoin requires an actual wallet. A physical device that will store your "money" ie. verifiable account info, the way a general purpose computer is storing it now.
Computer compromise leads to theft of bitcoins valued at $500,000 USD
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Re: Computer compromise leads to theft of bitcoins valued at $500,000 USD
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't want to risk wasting 45 minutes listening to a crackpot, and honestly, there are quite a few indicators for lunacy in the first few minutes. Can you give a few bullet points to help me decide if it's worth to watch?
It talks about the history of banking and the fractional reserve system, the difference between commercial and central bank money. What most people don't realize is that banks don't have to actually have the money they lend out. That's the basis for our monetary system and while it has nice qualities, like spurring innovation, there are some undeniable drawbacks.
You know these concepts are explained in any first-year economics textbook, yes?
Re: Computer compromise leads to theft of bitcoins valued at $500,000 USD
#143Re: Computer compromise leads to theft of bitcoins valued at $500,000 USD
#144Re: Computer compromise leads to theft of bitcoins valued at $500,000 USD
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, which is why if you have $500K you keep it in the bank and not in your wallet. (Err, not that $500K would fit in your wallet, but anyway...) Bitcoin has no "bank" equivalent.
Except you can put a wallet on a thumb drive, and literally put it in a bank (safe deposit box).
Probably makes sense to print it out on a sheet of paper and put it in there too.
Re: Computer compromise leads to theft of bitcoins valued at $500,000 USD
#146For a bunch of DIY hackers, I'm sort of surprised you guys are so willing to hand your money and control over its security over to the government and financial institutions. Then again, I was a computer security guy for the government and online financial institutions, so I guess I'm comfortable with my ability to protect my (very very small amount of) money, or I'm just more cynical about them.
Western Union is irreversible, and would probably have been shut down if it wasn't so well-established. Most other US payment systems are reversible, which is why you have holds on getting the money out of those systems - they want time to detect fraud and reverse the fraudulent transaction. This requirement for reversibility seeps through the system, which makes anonymity very difficult, and causes a lot of friction on anything that changes a reversible payment into a non-reversible payment, since that's where you eat the fraud. Now you know why it's hard to get cash equivalents out of the system, especially to a remote party.
The point here is that once the money is in a non-reversible network, you can accept a payment and know that it's good very very quickly. If you make bitcoin reversible, you might as well just use one of the old payment systems, where the money might disappear later (and you'll be out your privacy, goods, cash and services), or you'll be paying transaction fees based on your charge-back rates, and unable to charge more for the reversible payments than the non-reversible ones due to contracts you have to sign to be part of the payment network - and thus the non-reversible payers subsidize the reversible payers. What a racket.
As we used to say, "there's no good guys in payment processing, only bad guys and less-bad guys".