Bitcoin Security Debate

How so? Security of my Bitcoins is my responsibility. Same as keeping my banking credentials safe.

Bitcoins are a digital currency without a bank. If you kept all your money in cash at your house, and failed to secure your house, then someone could steal it. Sure, you could try to catch them based on the evidence they leave behind (fingerprints for cash, logfiles for bitcoin wallets), but once they have the cash, it's nearly untraceable.But if you have banks that store Bitcoins for you, then you're trusting their security processes, not your own. We don't have Bitcoin banks yet. For BC use

I'd say it's a little harder than not losing cash. If you put cash in a safe, you can be confident that an attacker can't take the cash without getting into the safe. If you put bitcoin in a safe, an attacker can take it without ever getting into the safe if you happened to forget about a copy of your private key somewhere else.

Your Bitcoin is also subject to theft. Hard theft or soft theft (lack of access). The chance of theft of either is relatively small. Seems like a non concern

The difference with bitcoin is that the protection is up to you. Same as with holding cash or precious metal in a safe at home. Except with bitcoin, you have m-of-n signatures, encrypted wallets, brain-wallets even. You can backup your encrypted wallet anywhere. Someone even put their wallet.dat on a website for anyone to download, but their passphrase is probably 1,000 random characters or something.

Exactly my point.With a bank I'm insured against theft. With bitcoin I am not.

If you hold your own gold, and it gets stolen, nobody is going to pay you back (unless you have some kind of insurance, which presumably could cover Bitcoins as well). Similarly, if you hold a gold certificate and a trusted party actually stores your gold, and it is stolen from them, you're in the same boat. Maybe they have a refund policy and enough capital to cover the loss. Maybe they don't. The point is, equal protections could be offered for Bitcoin.Personally, I think that har

You're bank just cant 0 out your account. and if your bank gets robbed or goes out of business, you still have your money. not the same for a bitcoin 'bank' as we have seen. they even resorted to telling clients to put their keys on paper, funny that

You being responsible for the security of your assets is the price you pay for having total control and ownership, just like with everything else. Putting money in the bank or PayPal reduces the risk of theft but increases the risk of bail-ins and account freeze. There is always a tradeoff.Bitcoin offers a lot of security mechanism that are not available with traditional asserts, like m-of-n-keys etc. Insured online wallets will become available as well.

Why weren't they insured against theft? Why did people deposit money with an exchange that is not insured against theft? Theft is a fact of life. You cannot have a perfectly secure bank, and you cannot have a perfectly secure bitcoin exchange. If you don't want to be hurt by theft, get insurance.