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Unless this alerts people to the risk of losing a private key and they decide owning Bitcoin isn't a great place to store wealth.

• anonporridge 5y ago
  Unless they then do the most minimal amount of research and realize that unlike any other store of wealth, they can redundantly back it up in multiple locations. You can even split up your key in an M of N format so that a) no single compromised location causes loss, and b) some number of storage locations can be lost without losing your key. Can you do that with gold? Land? Art? Cash? Bonds? Stocks? All of these rely on either securing a single location where the wealth is stored and moving to another place is either expensive, risky, or necessarily impossible (land/buildings), and/or they rely on trusting some custodian to preserve your claim on that wealth.
  • enkid 5y ago
    I'm not saying it's not possible to back up the key, I'm saying if a billion dollars disappear overnight because one person was stupid, we don't know the way people would react to that. May be they would value Bitcoin more or maybe they would value it less. It's not apparent less supply equals more demand in this specific case.
    • anonporridge 5y ago
      You're presenting this like it's a secret thing that lost private keys are irrecoverable. It's not a secret. Immutability is one of the key features and regularly advertised part of the system. So much so that when that irreconcilability is violated (e.g. rolling back the DAO hack in Ethereum) it's seen as a negative. There might be some morons who didn't do any research before investing, but they won't be a huge loss if they sell out and stay out.
      • GaylordTuring 5y ago
        > There might be some morons who didn't do any research before investing, but they won't be a huge loss if they sell out and stay out. I think you're underestimating the size of this group.
  • WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    > or they rely on trusting some custodian to preserve your claim on that wealth. Is this going to be one of this discussion where people try to pretend banks haven't existed for centuries and work very well for pretty much everyone?
    • me_me_me 5y ago
      This argument always baffled me as pro crypto person. There is a subset of religious crypto zelots that see banks as evil incarnate. Banks are example of what more-less people want from their currency. And crypto should be taking notes from CENTURIES of experiences. And not just shun it all and start from scratch. Loosing keys to wallet is huge problem for ubiquity of crypto, and as a currency of the future it might be fatal flaw. If someone steals my IRL wallet, I call bank to cancel my cards and cry a bit about lost cash and hustle of getting all ID's etc back. If I loose crypto wallet, its gone all of it. Without proper precautions of multiple wallets and safeguards you risk loosing all your wealth in accident or robbery without much to do about it.
• csomar 5y ago
  I mean many people have been moaning about a wealth tax. This is similar to a 100% tax on wealth with automatic airdrops.