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To me this marks a turning point in the maturity of bitcoin - major breaches may still be a cost of doing business, but end users can finally hope for some limi

by polarix 12y ago

To me this marks a turning point in the maturity of bitcoin - major breaches may still be a cost of doing business, but end users can finally hope for some limited insulation from such failures.

polarix 12y ago
This was perhaps too optimistic: time will tell.
IkmoIkmo 12y ago
Perhaps not this particular event, but definitely this period was a turning point. Multi-sig is a great example. Here's a chart on the amount of bitcoin stored in multi-sig addresses: http://p2sh.info/p2sh-ratio http://p2sh.info/p2sh-ratio Nine months ago it was sub 0.1%. Three months ago it was sub 1%. Today it's over 6% and growing rapidly. Multi-signature is just one example of potentially radically improved security versus the single key methods we had before. We've also seen in the past 6 months 3 companies come out with proper insurance. Circle, Xapo, Coinbase. All at a sub 1% cost. (Coinbase and Circle free, Xapo I think 0.12% annually). Combined with multi-sig vault products from Coinbase, which has done a lot of interesting security stuff. (the basic 2fa stuff of course, but I think also things like finterprinting devices to detect stolen credentials from users.) And with that, we're also seeing enterprise-products come out which offer bitcoin management in a secure way. I wouldn't be surprised if such a company like BitGo starts marketing insured warm wallets to exchanges on a percentage cost basis, and let exchanges offer users to pay for the option of this insurance. And we've seen more steps taken regarding the bitcoin ETF on the NASDAQ, which settles manually twice a day and allows (industrial) trading and liquidity but gets rid of the issue that Bitstamp and everyone else has: running a warm wallet on a server that automates transactions. The vast majority of Bitstamp's coins were in cold storage, but if you want to run automated transactions you can't do it on cold storage. So this period has definitely been a turning point I think. Will be interesting to see things develop the next few years.

by polarix 12y ago

To me this marks a turning point in the maturity of bitcoin - major breaches may still be a cost of doing business, but end users can finally hope for some limited insulation from such failures.

polarix 12y ago

This was perhaps too optimistic: time will tell.

IkmoIkmo 12y ago

Perhaps not this particular event, but definitely this period was a turning point. Multi-sig is a great example. Here's a chart on the amount of bitcoin stored in multi-sig addresses: http://p2sh.info/p2sh-ratio http://p2sh.info/p2sh-ratio Nine months ago it was sub 0.1%. Three months ago it was sub 1%. Today it's over 6% and growing rapidly. Multi-signature is just one example of potentially radically improved security versus the single key methods we had before. We've also seen in the past 6 months 3 companies come out with proper insurance. Circle, Xapo, Coinbase. All at a sub 1% cost. (Coinbase and Circle free, Xapo I think 0.12% annually). Combined with multi-sig vault products from Coinbase, which has done a lot of interesting security stuff. (the basic 2fa stuff of course, but I think also things like finterprinting devices to detect stolen credentials from users.) And with that, we're also seeing enterprise-products come out which offer bitcoin management in a secure way. I wouldn't be surprised if such a company like BitGo starts marketing insured warm wallets to exchanges on a percentage cost basis, and let exchanges offer users to pay for the option of this insurance. And we've seen more steps taken regarding the bitcoin ETF on the NASDAQ, which settles manually twice a day and allows (industrial) trading and liquidity but gets rid of the issue that Bitstamp and everyone else has: running a warm wallet on a server that automates transactions. The vast majority of Bitstamp's coins were in cold storage, but if you want to run automated transactions you can't do it on cold storage. So this period has definitely been a turning point I think. Will be interesting to see things develop the next few years.