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I always wondered why people don't transfer to offline wallets as soon as the trade goes through since most people are holding anyways. On traditional banking,

I always wondered why people don't transfer to offline wallets as soon as the trade goes through since most people are holding anyways. On traditional banking, It also depends on where you live. I doubt people in Cyprus, Zimbabwe, Venezuela and a couple other places feel that safe with their life savings in banks post 2007. I know JPM recently put capital controls on transfers greater than 50k outgoing from the US (but accepting incoming), I wonder what that is all about.

qnr 13y ago
Much of Bitcoin criticism (the chicagofed paper included) is very western centric and fails to take into account how utterly dysfunctional most countries' money systems are. In most countries in the world local currencies are unstable and subject to the whim of politicans (would you keep your life savings in argentinian pesos? Neither would Argentinians!), there are no easy ways to accept online payments, there are no easy ways to transfer money to/from abroad etcetera. I would argue that adopting Bitcoin is an immediate quality of life improvement for a big portion of the world population, moreso when/if it value stabilizes.
lectrick 13y ago
On the offline wallet thing- For the record, BIP 0038 https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0038 https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0038 was released just a few days ago (although it was a working draft for a while). You can, right now, create a BIP38 encrypted paper wallet (finally!) over at bitaddress.org which means that someone with access to your paper wallet can't just sweep it unless they know the key, and the key uses scrypt so it's quite resistant to brute forcing. I recently moved most of my btc savings into this type of paper (or in my case, pdf) wallet and entrusted the key (broken into pieces of course) to trusted people. Much better peace of mind. I set the public addresses as "Watch Only" on blockchain.info/wallet so even if blockchain is hacked, nobody can get to those wallets, they are effectively airgapped, and I can monitor any activity on them from anywhere.

qnr 13y ago

Much of Bitcoin criticism (the chicagofed paper included) is very western centric and fails to take into account how utterly dysfunctional most countries' money systems are. In most countries in the world local currencies are unstable and subject to the whim of politicans (would you keep your life savings in argentinian pesos? Neither would Argentinians!), there are no easy ways to accept online payments, there are no easy ways to transfer money to/from abroad etcetera. I would argue that adopting Bitcoin is an immediate quality of life improvement for a big portion of the world population, moreso when/if it value stabilizes.

lectrick 13y ago

On the offline wallet thing- For the record, BIP 0038 https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0038 https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0038 was released just a few days ago (although it was a working draft for a while). You can, right now, create a BIP38 encrypted paper wallet (finally!) over at bitaddress.org which means that someone with access to your paper wallet can't just sweep it unless they know the key, and the key uses scrypt so it's quite resistant to brute forcing. I recently moved most of my btc savings into this type of paper (or in my case, pdf) wallet and entrusted the key (broken into pieces of course) to trusted people. Much better peace of mind. I set the public addresses as "Watch Only" on blockchain.info/wallet so even if blockchain is hacked, nobody can get to those wallets, they are effectively airgapped, and I can monitor any activity on them from anywhere.