It certainly was, until the advent of hardware wallets. I wouldn't quite say its easy enough for Grandma to do it, but it makes things much more secure and its no more complicated than setting up a wallet on your machine (give or take a couple of steps).

I just went through the situation where a family member all of sudden panicked (1 week after I reiterated all disclaimers multiple times, I said BTC is stretched and he already missed all forks that may solve it, etc, etc) and wanted his BTC paper wallet transferred to anything else. 33 hours later and 2 times > 40 euros (> 600 Satoshi/Byte) of transfer cost later the BTC are now USD in Bittrex.

Never advice your family anything. If they don't get it, they shouldn't be playing with it. This was certainly my last time, I even think I'm flat out going to refuse to talk about anymore. This week I even received texts that I should act "before Amerika wakes up". It's stopping right now, he either learns the Gdax or I will transfer what's left of his money to his normal bank account (he should be happy it's still almost everything.)

I vehemently advise everyone to stay away from BTC unless you really, really know what you're doing and follow the market closely. Instead, I say to just find a small, cheap crypto that has sound fundamentals and go from there. There aren't many, but they exist.

Indeed. the operational risk is huge. even for tech savvy participants

What kind of non-technical person is trying to buy and manage a bitcoin wallet in the first place?

If the user is only willing to learn enough to keep the coins in Coinbase, then this person has no business dealing with Bitcoin at all.

> What kind of non-technical person is trying to buy and manage a bitcoin wallet in the first place?

I've had half a dozen non-technical friends ask me about getting into Bitcoin in the last month or so. Media attention, get-rich-quick, scams, etc. are all attracting hordes of people, to the point where the Coinbase app was #1 on the App Store for a while.

Even the people running exchanges are getting hacked. What chance does a normal user have?

> Even the people running exchanges are getting hacked. What chance does a normal user have?

I agree that actually securing a wallet, independently, as a non-technical user, is difficult. It is further exacerbated by, as you mentioned, the general hype around crypto related apps that promise to do this in a trivial way, which can often be traps.

I also, however, think your final question presents a false dichotomy, as the two (Exchanges and users) have different threat models.

Exchanges present a larger, highly lucrative target, meaning they are ammenable to expensive, targeted attacks as they can still be possible.

The security model for an individual user can be to secure their coins in a way that is relatively secure (Maybe not as absolutely, as they are not experts), but more importantly to secure their coins in a way which a scalable attack against many users is not tenable.

In this way, just because exchanges get hacked doesn’t necessarily imply that normal users don’t have a chance, as they have different threat models with their own nuances.

Edit: Cleaned up some wording

Ah man I had the same, how did you handle it? I regret helping anyone now, it was stressful and they underestimated the risk despite my constant nagging. Last week in BTC land was insane.

My stock response is "treat it as gambling - put in only what you can afford to completely lose, because I feel like it's a massive bubble, but it's impossible to predict when it might pop".

> If the user is only willing to learn enough to keep the coins in Coinbase, then this person has no business dealing with Bitcoin at all.

"It's the financial system of the future!"

"Only techies can use it!"

Pick one.

By 1950s standards, most Americans are "techies". We learn what we have to in order to survive in a given environment.

We use more technology, but we understand less about what makes it tick. Most of today's Americans can't change a flat tire, let alone the oil. 1950s America would laugh at us for that.

Someone's ability to use a smartphone doesn't mean they're capable of patching the thing to keep it secure.