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> it's cheaper to secure, transport, and hide Secure/hide: It has the same attack surface as gold, plus the downsides of potentially being exposed to online at

> it's cheaper to secure, transport, and hide Secure/hide: It has the same attack surface as gold, plus the downsides of potentially being exposed to online attacks, along with shoddy wallet implementations fail to use sufficient entropy in address generation, fail to only send to valid and current addresses, etc. I don't hear about people having their gold stolen or otherwise losing it on a daily basis, but I do hear about people losing their bitcoins all the time. Transport: an obvious advantage of bitcoin and it is currently cheaper, yet with the uncertainty in the blocksize debate and the utter lack of transparency in fee calculation, this may not always be the case. Transport currently simply fails sometimes on a miner's whim, and the user is left waiting for the transaction to clear from the mempool of enough nodes that they can respend the coins. There is currently no reason to believe that bitcoin per se can scale to even silver sizes from that graph, let alone come anywhere close to gold.

cs702 11y ago
Secure/hide: I disagree. A lot of gold is stored in heavily guarded, hidden underground vaults, which have evolved to be secure over thousands of years. I can't imagine why or how securing and hiding Bitcoin could ever be costlier than that. Reasons to believe why Bitcoin might scale to gold sizes from that graph over time: my thoughts on this are at https://cs702.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/on-the-potential-adoption-and-price-appreciation-of-bitcoin-in-the-long-run/ https://cs702.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/on-the-potential-adop...
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  Yeah, you can encrypt Bitcoin and so secure it with a passphrase, which can be memorized and all hard copies thrown away. Then you can distribute the files in hundreds of places, and not have to secure them. I'd be hard-pressed to imagine a scheme more secure than that. If the crypto fails, Bitcoin is going to be worthless anyway.
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    So a thief just picks up one of the hundreds of files, points his gun at you and says "What's the passphrase?" I think vaults probably handle that scenario better.
    - vinceguidry 11y ago
      He'd have to know it's a Bitcoin wallet first, then he'd have to know it's yours. With a vault, he could just point his gun at you and demand you get your people on the line to withdraw it and give it to him. Your comment has me doing a threat model in my head, and you're right it's not perfect, but I still can't imagine a better scheme. Essentially, if an adversary can break through your personal security and is capable and willing to threaten your life, then you have much bigger problems than losing your stash.
    - brianpgordon 11y ago
      Why do you think that you can't lock bitcoins in a vault? You just put your private key on a disk or flash drive or print it as a QR code and then lock that in a vault. It's called a cold wallet. That's what huge holders of bitcoin do to mitigate the risk of a security breach. They keep a small working amount of bitcoin in a hot wallet and keep the rest safe offline.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - droffel 11y ago
      Actually, the Trezor now supports passphrase-based wallets! https://doc.satoshilabs.com/trezor-user/advanced_settings.html https://doc.satoshilabs.com/trezor-user/advanced_settings.ht... Basically, you can memorize multiple passphrases, each of which leads to a valid set of addresses. If you're under duress, you can provide the passphrase to a dummy wallet that doesn't contain your full balance. As far as the attacker is concerned, they have no idea that a second account even exists.
  - flatline 11y ago
    I think this ignores the very real risk of simply forgetting the passphrase. It's not really an apples to apples comparison, but I do think there are significant, and in many cases similar, advantages and drawbacks to both.
mattmaroon 11y ago
Gold gets stolen all the time. Most people only keep it in the form of jewelry, but almost everyone knows several people who've had someone break into their house and steal it. (People who keep gold as a stash of wealth generally don't have it in their physical possession.) I'd argue there are probably thousands of instances of gold theft for every one of bitcoin. It's just not much of a story. Bitcoin is new and interesting, gold isn't.

cs702 11y ago

Secure/hide: I disagree. A lot of gold is stored in heavily guarded, hidden underground vaults, which have evolved to be secure over thousands of years. I can't imagine why or how securing and hiding Bitcoin could ever be costlier than that. Reasons to believe why Bitcoin might scale to gold sizes from that graph over time: my thoughts on this are at https://cs702.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/on-the-potential-adoption-and-price-appreciation-of-bitcoin-in-the-long-run/ https://cs702.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/on-the-potential-adop...

vinceguidry 11y ago
Yeah, you can encrypt Bitcoin and so secure it with a passphrase, which can be memorized and all hard copies thrown away. Then you can distribute the files in hundreds of places, and not have to secure them. I'd be hard-pressed to imagine a scheme more secure than that. If the crypto fails, Bitcoin is going to be worthless anyway.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  So a thief just picks up one of the hundreds of files, points his gun at you and says "What's the passphrase?" I think vaults probably handle that scenario better.
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    He'd have to know it's a Bitcoin wallet first, then he'd have to know it's yours. With a vault, he could just point his gun at you and demand you get your people on the line to withdraw it and give it to him. Your comment has me doing a threat model in my head, and you're right it's not perfect, but I still can't imagine a better scheme. Essentially, if an adversary can break through your personal security and is capable and willing to threaten your life, then you have much bigger problems than losing your stash.
  - brianpgordon 11y ago
    Why do you think that you can't lock bitcoins in a vault? You just put your private key on a disk or flash drive or print it as a QR code and then lock that in a vault. It's called a cold wallet. That's what huge holders of bitcoin do to mitigate the risk of a security breach. They keep a small working amount of bitcoin in a hot wallet and keep the rest safe offline.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - droffel 11y ago
    Actually, the Trezor now supports passphrase-based wallets! https://doc.satoshilabs.com/trezor-user/advanced_settings.html https://doc.satoshilabs.com/trezor-user/advanced_settings.ht... Basically, you can memorize multiple passphrases, each of which leads to a valid set of addresses. If you're under duress, you can provide the passphrase to a dummy wallet that doesn't contain your full balance. As far as the attacker is concerned, they have no idea that a second account even exists.
- flatline 11y ago
  I think this ignores the very real risk of simply forgetting the passphrase. It's not really an apples to apples comparison, but I do think there are significant, and in many cases similar, advantages and drawbacks to both.

mattmaroon 11y ago

Gold gets stolen all the time. Most people only keep it in the form of jewelry, but almost everyone knows several people who've had someone break into their house and steal it. (People who keep gold as a stash of wealth generally don't have it in their physical possession.) I'd argue there are probably thousands of instances of gold theft for every one of bitcoin. It's just not much of a story. Bitcoin is new and interesting, gold isn't.