5 ms·

Not only is Bitcoin sent frequently, it's also stolen frequently: http://rt.com/news/bitcoin-hacking-stolen-million-417/ http://rt.com/news/bitcoin-hacking-sto

Not only is Bitcoin sent frequently, it's also stolen frequently: http://rt.com/news/bitcoin-hacking-stolen-million-417/ http://rt.com/news/bitcoin-hacking-stolen-million-417/ http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/250-000-worth-bitcoins-stolen-net-heist-980871 http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/250-000-worth-bitcoins-sto... http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/czech-bitcoin-exchange-bitcash.cz-hacked.html http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/czech-bitcoi... edit: unrelated, someone should make an index of how many Bitcoin threads hit the front page of HN per day.

fragsworth 13y ago
It's well-known that you can at least secure your bitcoins as well as you can secure gold, if you use cold wallets. The advantage, however, is you don't have to worry nearly as much about the security of a transaction (moving it from one place to another)
- foobarqux 13y ago
  Not really. It is much easier to lose or make illegible a piece of paper or data than it is to lose large heavy gold or to damage the gold to a degree that severely reduces its value.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    OTOH, its hard to make redundant copies of a gold bar that retain the full value of the original so that if the original is damaged, nothing is lost.
  - foobarian 13y ago
    Actually, you could--you could irradiate the gold to the point where decontamination would cost on the order of the worth of the gold itself.
    - sejje 13y ago
      I don't know about you, but no, I can't do that.
    - reillyse 13y ago
      upvote for mentioning the evil scheming of a Bond villain in a serious conversation as a serious answer :)
    - foobarqux 13y ago
      No one said it was impossible to damage gold (there are easier wayd than to make it radioactive). It's just much harder compared to doing comparable or greater value destruction to a bitcoin address, especially accidentally.
- socillion 13y ago
  It has been demonstrated that: 1) gold can be stolen due to mistakes 2) bitcoin can be stolen due to mistakes but this does not mean that it is impossible to avoid having either stolen. I agree that long term storage of both of these can be done very securely, but the risk for both is when trading or using them. Additionally, Bitcoin does require a lot of worry about security - how many people do you think have airgapped wallets? Aren't the facts that you shouldn't store Bitcoin at exchanges, should use an airgapped storage mechanism, and are otherwise out of luck if your computer is compromised, enough to demonstrate that you also have to worry a lot about the security of Bitcoin transactions? Your stack of gold ingots won't vanish if you take one from the pile in your safe, but your Bitcoins can if you don't take stringent precautions. If you view a Bitcoin transaction as only what happens on the blockchain, you're missing the context of where it occurs - which gives both gold and Bitcoin risk.
- apw 13y ago
  Good point, the minimum security of Bitcoin is that of gold; i.e. a safe guarded by people with weapons. But since Bitcoin is digital, its maximum security is far, far higher. Your private keys can be encrypted and safely stored with any desired level of redundancy. Paper wallets are a big step backwards. Also, if secret sharing is used, Bitcoins cannot be stolen unless the attacker gets to k of the n involved parties.
tlrobinson 13y ago
The difference is Bitcoin can be secured much more cheaply than gold. You can't encrypt gold, setup "n-of-m" multisig transactions, etc. Unless you want to transport gold yourself you're always going to have to trust someone. Hardware wallets should help immensely as well.
- CoryG89 13y ago
  From where I stand, this seems to be true of Bitcoin as well. I've never had any Bitcoins personally, but don't you have to store them in a wallet, which you're either going to have to worry about backing up, keeping secure, etc on your own. Or you're going to have to trust someone else to do it for you.
  - Noxchi 13y ago
    You can also store it physically, like on a piece of paper I believe. Or on a USB.
    - bigiain 13y ago
      Yep: https://blockchain.info/wallet/paper-tutorial https://blockchain.info/wallet/paper-tutorial As with _all_ security, there's a tradeoff between security and convenience. Inline wallets are spectacularly convenient - and guess what that implies security-wise? Paper wallets are much more hassle. But a paper wallet in a bank vault is arguably up there with the most secure bitcoin storage techniques. As the stored value of your bitcoin varies - so should your security requirements. If I need to keep under $100USD available to pay for my anonymous vpn or my torrent-box vps - an online wallet (who's operator could make off with my half or quarter of a bitcoin at any time) might be a sensible choice. If I'd been mining bitcoin at a reasonable rate since 2009 and was sitting on a house-worth of bitcoins, I'd make a _very_ different choice. Consider the value of your wallet(s) - if they were piles of $50 notes, how much would you spend securing that? Would you leave it in your pocket? Hide it under you mattress? Buy a lockbox or a safe for your home? Rent a safe deposit box? At what stage is a never-internet-connected laptop a perfectly sensible expense to incur? I'd suggest a lot of people I see posting in forums about how much they lost in onine-wallet-hack-de-jour who should be kicking themselves for not having a dedicated $300 laptop fr storing their wallets on.
JimmaDaRustla 13y ago
Your point stands, but most thefts occur on third party sites/applications where the address of the coins and their private key are stored in a central location. Owners of the bitcoin should transfer their coins to a private wallet. I don't understand how so many sites can't use password hash generation to secure the private keys, or something to keep it more secure. The first link you posted was a site run by an 18 year old.
- bfell 13y ago
  This is a good point and one that I considered and wish I followed up on. I'm in the "support queue" with Coinbase right now because they absconded with 10% of my bitcoin holdings for no discernible reason. In case you're concerned, I'm not the one with $150M in bitcoin - it was 1 btc that went missing (greatly appreciated in value from when I acquired it).
- giovannibajo1 13y ago
  Sorry to digress a little, but I'm sensitive on age issues :) Pinkie Pie won his first $50k award by creating a 0-day sandbox escape on Chrome, by chaining 10 different vulnerabilities. He was 19 (now almost 21). Two years before, at 17, he released jailbreakme.com, all by himself, which was a 0-day able to jailbreak all iOS models shipped to date by just visiting a website. Age means nothing by itself, but the point is correct. The problem is that we don't know how much we can trust bitcoin site owners, as most of them are relatively new with no history to inspect, closed source, and sometimes even run by anonymous users whose experience we can't inspect.
  - jessedhillon 13y ago
    Anecdotes don't negate stereotypes, which are themselves generalizations across numerous anecdotes. And stereotyping is not by itself an invalid source of information, just less reliable than, say, a study. Everyone knows one person who negates a stereotype -- any stereotype. The existence of that person doesn't reduce the usefulness of that stereotype.
  - gnaritas 13y ago
iSnow 13y ago
>someone should make an index of how many Bitcoin threads hit the front page of HN per day Something like that: http://influxdb.org/blog/visualizing_bitcoin_post_frequency_on_hn_using_influxdb_and_rickshaw.html http://influxdb.org/blog/visualizing_bitcoin_post_frequency_... ?
- socillion 13y ago
  Awesome! Thank you, I was hoping someone else would have had the same idea.

fragsworth 13y ago

It's well-known that you can at least secure your bitcoins as well as you can secure gold, if you use cold wallets. The advantage, however, is you don't have to worry nearly as much about the security of a transaction (moving it from one place to another)

foobarqux 13y ago
Not really. It is much easier to lose or make illegible a piece of paper or data than it is to lose large heavy gold or to damage the gold to a degree that severely reduces its value.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  OTOH, its hard to make redundant copies of a gold bar that retain the full value of the original so that if the original is damaged, nothing is lost.
- foobarian 13y ago
  Actually, you could--you could irradiate the gold to the point where decontamination would cost on the order of the worth of the gold itself.
  - sejje 13y ago
    I don't know about you, but no, I can't do that.
  - reillyse 13y ago
    upvote for mentioning the evil scheming of a Bond villain in a serious conversation as a serious answer :)
  - foobarqux 13y ago
    No one said it was impossible to damage gold (there are easier wayd than to make it radioactive). It's just much harder compared to doing comparable or greater value destruction to a bitcoin address, especially accidentally.
socillion 13y ago
It has been demonstrated that: 1) gold can be stolen due to mistakes 2) bitcoin can be stolen due to mistakes but this does not mean that it is impossible to avoid having either stolen. I agree that long term storage of both of these can be done very securely, but the risk for both is when trading or using them. Additionally, Bitcoin does require a lot of worry about security - how many people do you think have airgapped wallets? Aren't the facts that you shouldn't store Bitcoin at exchanges, should use an airgapped storage mechanism, and are otherwise out of luck if your computer is compromised, enough to demonstrate that you also have to worry a lot about the security of Bitcoin transactions? Your stack of gold ingots won't vanish if you take one from the pile in your safe, but your Bitcoins can if you don't take stringent precautions. If you view a Bitcoin transaction as only what happens on the blockchain, you're missing the context of where it occurs - which gives both gold and Bitcoin risk.
apw 13y ago
Good point, the minimum security of Bitcoin is that of gold; i.e. a safe guarded by people with weapons. But since Bitcoin is digital, its maximum security is far, far higher. Your private keys can be encrypted and safely stored with any desired level of redundancy. Paper wallets are a big step backwards. Also, if secret sharing is used, Bitcoins cannot be stolen unless the attacker gets to k of the n involved parties.

tlrobinson 13y ago

The difference is Bitcoin can be secured much more cheaply than gold. You can't encrypt gold, setup "n-of-m" multisig transactions, etc. Unless you want to transport gold yourself you're always going to have to trust someone. Hardware wallets should help immensely as well.

CoryG89 13y ago
From where I stand, this seems to be true of Bitcoin as well. I've never had any Bitcoins personally, but don't you have to store them in a wallet, which you're either going to have to worry about backing up, keeping secure, etc on your own. Or you're going to have to trust someone else to do it for you.
- Noxchi 13y ago
  You can also store it physically, like on a piece of paper I believe. Or on a USB.
  - bigiain 13y ago
    Yep: https://blockchain.info/wallet/paper-tutorial https://blockchain.info/wallet/paper-tutorial As with _all_ security, there's a tradeoff between security and convenience. Inline wallets are spectacularly convenient - and guess what that implies security-wise? Paper wallets are much more hassle. But a paper wallet in a bank vault is arguably up there with the most secure bitcoin storage techniques. As the stored value of your bitcoin varies - so should your security requirements. If I need to keep under $100USD available to pay for my anonymous vpn or my torrent-box vps - an online wallet (who's operator could make off with my half or quarter of a bitcoin at any time) might be a sensible choice. If I'd been mining bitcoin at a reasonable rate since 2009 and was sitting on a house-worth of bitcoins, I'd make a _very_ different choice. Consider the value of your wallet(s) - if they were piles of $50 notes, how much would you spend securing that? Would you leave it in your pocket? Hide it under you mattress? Buy a lockbox or a safe for your home? Rent a safe deposit box? At what stage is a never-internet-connected laptop a perfectly sensible expense to incur? I'd suggest a lot of people I see posting in forums about how much they lost in onine-wallet-hack-de-jour who should be kicking themselves for not having a dedicated $300 laptop fr storing their wallets on.

JimmaDaRustla 13y ago

Your point stands, but most thefts occur on third party sites/applications where the address of the coins and their private key are stored in a central location. Owners of the bitcoin should transfer their coins to a private wallet. I don't understand how so many sites can't use password hash generation to secure the private keys, or something to keep it more secure. The first link you posted was a site run by an 18 year old.

bfell 13y ago
This is a good point and one that I considered and wish I followed up on. I'm in the "support queue" with Coinbase right now because they absconded with 10% of my bitcoin holdings for no discernible reason. In case you're concerned, I'm not the one with $150M in bitcoin - it was 1 btc that went missing (greatly appreciated in value from when I acquired it).
giovannibajo1 13y ago
Sorry to digress a little, but I'm sensitive on age issues :) Pinkie Pie won his first $50k award by creating a 0-day sandbox escape on Chrome, by chaining 10 different vulnerabilities. He was 19 (now almost 21). Two years before, at 17, he released jailbreakme.com, all by himself, which was a 0-day able to jailbreak all iOS models shipped to date by just visiting a website. Age means nothing by itself, but the point is correct. The problem is that we don't know how much we can trust bitcoin site owners, as most of them are relatively new with no history to inspect, closed source, and sometimes even run by anonymous users whose experience we can't inspect.
- jessedhillon 13y ago
  Anecdotes don't negate stereotypes, which are themselves generalizations across numerous anecdotes. And stereotyping is not by itself an invalid source of information, just less reliable than, say, a study. Everyone knows one person who negates a stereotype -- any stereotype. The existence of that person doesn't reduce the usefulness of that stereotype.
- gnaritas 13y ago

iSnow 13y ago

>someone should make an index of how many Bitcoin threads hit the front page of HN per day Something like that: http://influxdb.org/blog/visualizing_bitcoin_post_frequency_on_hn_using_influxdb_and_rickshaw.html http://influxdb.org/blog/visualizing_bitcoin_post_frequency_... ?

socillion 13y ago
Awesome! Thank you, I was hoping someone else would have had the same idea.