4 ms·
As much as I dislike PayPal, I would never want to trade it for Bitcoin. All it takes is one zero-day exploit for all of my funds to disappear at once without a
by p49k 10y ago
As much as I dislike PayPal, I would never want to trade it for Bitcoin. All it takes is one zero-day exploit for all of my funds to disappear at once without a trace. Any purchase I would make has zero protection and zero recourse for recovering funds if I'm ripped off. No, thanks. I just want something like PayPal, but that is run by people who have empathy and care about providing a good experience.
- nicky0 10y agoDepends how you store your bitcoin. You can't zero-day exploit a cold wallet.
- p49k 10y agoI don't use bitcoin, so I might be missing something, but don't you have to transfer funds from the cold wallet to your device at some point, and doesn't that mean that any malware waiting on your device could just grab the whole thing at that exact moment? In any case, even if you could secure the wallet, it still doesn't address the fact that once the funds are sent, they're not recoverable; I think it's unreasonable to expect a payment system with no rollback mechanism to go mainstream.
- maxerickson 10y agoIt should be possible to generate a transaction on a secure system and only move that to the networked system. The transaction data would only be useful for the specific transaction, it couldn't be used to move funds to addresses not in the transaction or to move additional funds between the addresses, etc. It'd be a glorious pain in the ass to do it, but it is possible.
- floatboth 10y agoIIRC Armory provides a user interface for doing this. Still, that's probably too paranoid for most typical transactions.
- nicky0 10y agoYou do have to sign a transaction using your private key. However this signature can occur totally offline in a non-connected device. Only the resulting signature has to be transmitted to the network. Irrevocability of transfers can be seen as a benefit or a drawback of course.
- jstanley 9y ago> don't you have to transfer funds from the cold wallet to your device at some point You can use a hardware wallet. I do. All of the cryptography takes place on the hardware wallet device, and there is only a small, well-defined interface between the wallet device and the computer. I use a Trezor[1], and like it. A Ledger Nano S[2] is also good (a bit more button-clicking required on the device, but improved Ethereum support - it integrates with Mist with no additional setup required). [1] https://shop.trezor.io/ https://shop.trezor.io/ [2] https://www.ledgerwallet.com/products/12-ledger-nano-s https://www.ledgerwallet.com/products/12-ledger-nano-s
- jaclaz 10y agoStill, a number of things may go bad, at least judging from: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Cold_storage https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Cold_storage
- jliptzin 10y agoIt's not as easy as you think to just have bitcoins stolen from you, especially if you know what you're doing. You're more likely to just forget your password or something. And as for zero purchase protection, you can use escrow services for significant purchases.
- zokier 10y ago> And as for zero purchase protection, you can use escrow services for significant purchases. And that gets us back to paypal (which started up as an escrow for ebay afterall) or some equivalent. Bitcoin offers no help here.
- atemerev 10y agoMy Bitcoin funds are stored in cold storage (private key printed on paper and stored in wall safe; good luck in zero-daying _that_). The only thing that can end Bitcoin is breaking sec256k1 elliptic curve, and this is unlikely to happen soon.