Bad code may be to blame for $500M of cryptocurrency losses in seven months

Post by dangerboysteve » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 8:30 PM UTC

wereHamster wrote: post #37

zaroth wrote: post #23

Consider this: Every single Bitcoin mined has either been lost/stolen, or will be lost/stolen, with probability approaching 1 over increasing timespans. I’d argue that since January 2009 about 50% of the ~17M coins minted to-date are lost. But the realization that this number will asymptotically approach 100% of all coins is a bit striking. The reasoning is simple - maintaining control of your coins is surprisingly d…

Backing your coins up is very easy, most wallets support BIP32/39/44. Just write the mnemonic down and put it under your mattress. Or a safe if you have one. But seriously, for most people under the mattress is equally safe. I don't understand why anyone would keep a non-trivial amount of coins in a wallet and not have a backup. That's irresponsible.

Post by gamblor956 » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 9:36 PM UTC

dlwdlw wrote: post #59

rulum wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is exactly what you don't want in "money" in a functional economy. You don't want deflation. You want price stability. So the more it gets artificially valuable, the more useless it becomes for its intended purpose.

It is valuable as a store of value though. Either pure like gold, or tied to something more like assets. USD is a bit strange because it is both a store of value used by many countries as well as a currency. there is an implicit peg to oil though. So the the price of oil is something fairly important to the US.

Post by mort96 » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 11:30 PM UTC

curuinor wrote: post #58

SamPatt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using cryptocurrency for over five years and haven't lost as much as a satoshi. It's no more difficult than keeping other sensitive data secure.

So it's hard as hell?

Post by mort96 » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 11:52 PM UTC

jnordwick wrote: post #52

jebeng wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply is increasing though through mining. Stolen coins are still coins. And there's no way that lost coins are out pasing newly mined coins. True loss/data destruction/inaccessibility is fairly rare. Even in the Bitcoin community it's a huge misconception that Bitcoin is somehow inherently deflationary. The supply increases predictably through mining. It can be price deflationary when demand exceeds supply. But the…

Btc has a fixed supply that will be hit. About 17 of the 21 million have already been mined. That's a hard cap unless bitcoin radically changes. We will hit a time of zero miner reward, and even before that when the reward in miniscule in relation to float. We don't know the extent of lost coins. We can make an estimate based on inactive accounts. And stolen coins that have been blacklisted are essentially lost too.…

Post by tim333 » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 6:19 AM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #43

zaroth wrote: post #23

Consider this: Every single Bitcoin mined has either been lost/stolen, or will be lost/stolen, with probability approaching 1 over increasing timespans. I’d argue that since January 2009 about 50% of the ~17M coins minted to-date are lost. But the realization that this number will asymptotically approach 100% of all coins is a bit striking. The reasoning is simple - maintaining control of your coins is surprisingly d…

It's not that hard. Do what you would do with a large amount of cash or gold coins: put it in a safe deposit box. Or a private vault, if you're ideologically opposed to banks. Unlike gold, you can also add redundancy and cryptographic protection, but even without that you can at least be as secure as you are with gold, which plenty of rich people store in vaults without issues.