3 ms·

As I understand it if security is done correctly then "stealing bitcoins" amounts to breaking strong cryptography. At this point nothing indicates that the elli

As I understand it if security is done correctly then "stealing bitcoins" amounts to breaking strong cryptography. At this point nothing indicates that the elliptic curves or the cryptographic hashes (SHA-256, RIPEMD-160) used in Bitcoin are at risk. Under the assumption that the crypto used in Bitcoin is safe, there's, for example, nothing an attacker can do to spend the coins in offline wallets. Not even a 50%+1 attack that'd be sustained for days... If anything, the recent fiasco with Gox (which is more than shaddy) gives me lots and lots of confidence in Coinbase to do "the right thing". Now I'm not saying they'll never get pirated or anything like that. But Bitcoin implemented correctly seems to be very safe and there are many people out there who have bitcoins which are "sleeping" safely on offline wallets in deep cold storage. Most people holding bitcoins and most companies like Coinbase only need a fraction of their bitcoins "online" to be able to operate. And even for those bitcoins I take it Coinbase is taking security very seriously.

MichaelGG 13y ago
Yeah, we'd hope they have some serious M-of-N key system in place to safeguard access to the wallets. The biggest thing that gives me pause about Coinbase is their decision to use MongoDB. There may be a reason, but I certainly can't find one. Their use case is perfect for proper, old-fashioned, reliable RDBMS. They've also had a fair amount of customer service issues, including "we rebooted and our job queues didn't run anymore" problem where they tried to rip that guy off. Even so, the security of the offline wallet is so important, you'd think their investors will have insisted on some auditing and third party implementation. Maybe some of the big wallets are even partially held by outside people.

3 ms·

As I understand it if security is done correctly then "stealing bitcoins" amounts to breaking strong cryptography. At this point nothing indicates that the elli

by TacticalCoder 13y ago

MichaelGG 13y ago
Yeah, we'd hope they have some serious M-of-N key system in place to safeguard access to the wallets. The biggest thing that gives me pause about Coinbase is their decision to use MongoDB. There may be a reason, but I certainly can't find one. Their use case is perfect for proper, old-fashioned, reliable RDBMS. They've also had a fair amount of customer service issues, including "we rebooted and our job queues didn't run anymore" problem where they tried to rip that guy off. Even so, the security of the offline wallet is so important, you'd think their investors will have insisted on some auditing and third party implementation. Maybe some of the big wallets are even partially held by outside people.