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If someone steals money from my Bank account my bank will retun the money next business day. No police reports required and little intervention on my part. I’ve

• dylkil 8y ago
  Your bank takes the loss on those stolen funds. Bitcoin is more akin to cash in hand than cash in a bank account, the title of the white paper is a 'A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System'. It behaves like cash.
• Scene_Cast2 8y ago
  You're conflating reduction of risk (system-wide) and offloading of risk. In your bank example, the bank likely took the financial hit. With bitcoin as an underlying tech, there's some reduction of risk (with a whole bunch of asterisks).
  • wil421 8y ago
    Why would I care if the banks took a hit? If fraud was hurting their margins significantly we would see the government step in. The banks would also do more to prevent it. The US just switched over to chip cards.
    • JangoSteve 8y ago
      Because you're paying for it with your money. They can afford to take a hit (and can afford the insurance for such losses) because of the fees they charge you directly, and the money they make utilizing your principle for other purposes while it's there.
      • deleted 8y ago
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• snissn 8y ago
  There could be a crypto based bank account just like there are usd based bank accounts
• updateYourMind 8y ago
  You can have a bank working on top of a cryptocurrency network. It's the same except that everything is transparent + you don't need a bank if you don't want one.
  • repomies68 8y ago
    Essentially all these services and exchange that offer bitcoin wallets are like banks. I think they have been the main way to get and hold bitcoin since the early days, I would guess normal standalone wallets are in the minority when it comes to the amount of users. For quantity stored maybe not so much.
• mikeash 8y ago
  Bitcoin is an attempt to make digital stuff that behaves as much as possible like physical cash. In terms of the way it works, a bank account is very much not the correct analogy. Cash is. Losing $60,000 in Bitcoin is like losing $60,000 in cash. It’s not exactly a surprise that it can happen, and it’s expected that there will be no real recourse. I think the trouble is that people still aren’t really thinking of it properly. If this story happened with cash, the first question everybody would be asking would probably be, “Why did you have $60,000 in cash sitting around? What did you think was going to happen?” Like cash, most people shouldn’t be holding large amounts of Bitcoin themselves. If they want large Bitcoin holdings for whatever reason, they should be held with a trustworthy entity that can properly secure them, like a bank. If they do insist on holding large amounts of Bitcoin directly, they need to understand that it’s like keeping a vault full of cash, and they need to work hard to keep it secure.
  • fixermark 8y ago
    Correction: BTC is an attempt to make digital stuff that behaves as much as possible like physical gold. Cash is a fiat currency and reproducible infinitely by the controlling government. The point of gold (as a money medium) is that it self-regulates the amount in circulation by being a tangible material in finite supply with cost associated in seeking more. This model has significant benefits and drawbacks (and, it's probably worth noting, its drawbacks are what led to the fiat model most countries use today).
    • mikeash 8y ago
      I don’t think “cash” necessarily implies fiat. Bitcoin’s model of creating new currency is different from both fiat and gold, although it’s certainly a lot closer to gold.
    • 908087 8y ago
      Remember the last time 20 different entities forked gold, and battles erupted over which one was "the one true gold"? Neither do I.
  • jancsika 8y ago
• ravingraven 8y ago
  >Your comparing cash to something electronic. No matter how you spin it Bitcoin is not physical. You say that like it's a bad thing. Bitcoin is something that has the advantage of physical cash (trust-less) and the advantage of electronic communications (you can't practically send cash to the other side of the world). It also, of course, has the disadvantage of physical cash which is, once it's gone, it's gone. There is no way to reverse trust-less transactions now and there was none in the (pre-Bitcoin) past. Nothing has changed there and this is not what crypto solves. What crypto solves is trust-less transactions over the internet.
  • rootusrootus 8y ago
    Doesn't it also have the disadvantage that, unlike physical cash, it can be stolen electronically? At least with cash someone has to mug me in person to take it, which reduces the attack surface quite a lot.
    • nyuszika7h 8y ago
      You could write down your seed on paper instead of storing it or the private key electronically.