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I keep my money as cash, in a vault that I had to design and build from scratch in my own home. It's probably not secure against robbery, but it's how I have to

I keep my money as cash, in a vault that I had to design and build from scratch in my own home. It's probably not secure against robbery, but it's how I have to store my money to avoid the fact that all the banks are being robbed blind all the time. When I do actually have to transfer money to someone, I go to a bank where I keep a zero-balance account, make a deposit and physically stay there until it clears. Then I initiate the transfer, and as soon as that clears I immediately withdraw any leftover funds from the account and go back home to put it in my vault. If someone had seriously proposed this as a way they use traditional cash + banks, you'd be laughing at them.

riboflava 10y ago
Many laughable things become fine with technology. Look at various encryption or network protocols. If someone had seriously proposed to Caesar that to keep their messages truly safe they needed to work out the math of a one time pad for every communication (or maybe more practically by modern standards, AES), they'd be executed. Rather than dismiss things on analogy, look at things as they actually are. The total amount of friction for the bitcoin equivalent is very little which makes it not a problem at all.
- devishard 10y ago
  If I have to transfer my money into an exchange, wait for it to clear, and then immediately transfer it out into a wallet with a long random address with a random key that I then have to protect, that's not "very little friction" compared to traditional banking. There are many benefits to cryptocurrency, but ease of use is not one of them, and when you claim it is, you come across as out-of-touch with the average user.
CydeWeys 10y ago
The analogy fails because it's different in a substantial number of ways. That's the problem with arguments by analogy in general -- they're weak. I'm not proposing an alternative to cash and banks here, I'm just pointing out that, if you have Bitcoin and want to sell it for fiat currency, using an exchange is definitely the easiest way to do so, and a best practice for doing so is to hold your cryptocurrencies yourself and only move them to the exchange when you're selling them, rather than holding them in the exchange.

riboflava 10y ago

Many laughable things become fine with technology. Look at various encryption or network protocols. If someone had seriously proposed to Caesar that to keep their messages truly safe they needed to work out the math of a one time pad for every communication (or maybe more practically by modern standards, AES), they'd be executed. Rather than dismiss things on analogy, look at things as they actually are. The total amount of friction for the bitcoin equivalent is very little which makes it not a problem at all.

devishard 10y ago
If I have to transfer my money into an exchange, wait for it to clear, and then immediately transfer it out into a wallet with a long random address with a random key that I then have to protect, that's not "very little friction" compared to traditional banking. There are many benefits to cryptocurrency, but ease of use is not one of them, and when you claim it is, you come across as out-of-touch with the average user.

CydeWeys 10y ago

The analogy fails because it's different in a substantial number of ways. That's the problem with arguments by analogy in general -- they're weak. I'm not proposing an alternative to cash and banks here, I'm just pointing out that, if you have Bitcoin and want to sell it for fiat currency, using an exchange is definitely the easiest way to do so, and a best practice for doing so is to hold your cryptocurrencies yourself and only move them to the exchange when you're selling them, rather than holding them in the exchange.