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I only carry a small amount of cash at any time. If bitcoin is only as secure as cash, then no one will maintain any more bitcoin currency than a few hundred do

I only carry a small amount of cash at any time. If bitcoin is only as secure as cash, then no one will maintain any more bitcoin currency than a few hundred dollars. It would be irresponsible to entrust tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to the integrity of your hard drive and its backup(s). Or is bitcoin not meant to become a currency that people would hold in values larger than a few hundred dollars?

DenisM 15y ago
See, you learned! You learned not to store all your cash in one place (on your person, or in your home). Surely you will also learn to store or bitcoin stash in an appropriate electronic analogue of the safe deposit box. Like dropbox, only with real encryption.
- jaysonelliot 15y ago
  Are you saying that you would keep the bitcoin equivalent of, say, USD$100,000 in this hypothetical secure location? For bitcoin to become a viable alternative currency, everyone's wallet needs to be distributed as widely as a torrent file, and secure enough that only the owner can ever open it.
  - DenisM 15y ago
    Sure. I would store it encrypted in the cloud, and I would give the copy of the key to my trusted friends, relatives,my lawyer, and my accountant. Better yet, I would give halves of the key to all those people, with some redundancy.
    - mike_esspe 15y ago
      I think this is a great idea for bitcoin startup, especially generating halves of encryption keys.
shazow 15y ago
A common strategy is to keep a separate secure "Savings Wallet". Here's one way to do it: Make a new wallet with a receiving address you note down somewhere, compress/encrypt the wallet file with the strongest password you'll remember, shred evidence of the unencrypted file, put the encrypted file on a few USB sticks, and hide them. You can put one in a safety deposit box, if you wish. Now this is the beauty of Bitcoin: You can continue sending money to the receiving address of your Savings Wallet without ever opening it and firing it up. Someday, perhaps after the financial apocalypse, you can decrypt your wallet file, open it, and your client will start downloading all the transaction history from your peers which will eventually accumulate all the savings you've sent to it. Then, you can start spending them.

DenisM 15y ago

See, you learned! You learned not to store all your cash in one place (on your person, or in your home). Surely you will also learn to store or bitcoin stash in an appropriate electronic analogue of the safe deposit box. Like dropbox, only with real encryption.

jaysonelliot 15y ago
Are you saying that you would keep the bitcoin equivalent of, say, USD$100,000 in this hypothetical secure location? For bitcoin to become a viable alternative currency, everyone's wallet needs to be distributed as widely as a torrent file, and secure enough that only the owner can ever open it.
- DenisM 15y ago
  Sure. I would store it encrypted in the cloud, and I would give the copy of the key to my trusted friends, relatives,my lawyer, and my accountant. Better yet, I would give halves of the key to all those people, with some redundancy.
  - mike_esspe 15y ago
    I think this is a great idea for bitcoin startup, especially generating halves of encryption keys.

shazow 15y ago

A common strategy is to keep a separate secure "Savings Wallet". Here's one way to do it: Make a new wallet with a receiving address you note down somewhere, compress/encrypt the wallet file with the strongest password you'll remember, shred evidence of the unencrypted file, put the encrypted file on a few USB sticks, and hide them. You can put one in a safety deposit box, if you wish. Now this is the beauty of Bitcoin: You can continue sending money to the receiving address of your Savings Wallet without ever opening it and firing it up. Someday, perhaps after the financial apocalypse, you can decrypt your wallet file, open it, and your client will start downloading all the transaction history from your peers which will eventually accumulate all the savings you've sent to it. Then, you can start spending them.