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Re:Bad code may be to blame for $500M of cryptocurrency loss... by SamPatt on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @09:09AM (#16367173)
I've been using cryptocurrency for over five years and haven't lost as much as a satoshi. It's no more difficult than keeping other sensitive data secure.
Re:Bad code may be to blame for $500M of cryptocurrency loss... by ifdefdebug on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @09:23AM (#16367283)
The argument still holds. As long as there is a tiny probability for you or someone else to lose their private keys, and I don't see how that probability can be reduced to zero, bitcoin supply will approach zero over time.

And I don't think we are talking about some theoretical astronomical time span here - after a few hundred years (assuming in a few hundred years someone still cares about the bitcoin ledger), the proportion of lost coins must be huge - just think about people passing away without providing a way for their heirs to find the keys, maybe because they die young or because they have no heirs etc.

Re:Bad code may be to blame for $500M of cryptocurrency loss... by CodeCube on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @09:11AM (#16367201)
to be fair, by commenting on this very forum, you're already not "the norm" ... the average user can barely keep track of their password!! I'd argue that most users already have some form of 2 factor auth, because they can literally never remember their password, so they (barely) remember their password as the 1st, and then the "change password" email serves as the 2nd.

So yeah, not very good at maintaining data secure for the average person ;)

Re:Bad code may be to blame for $500M of cryptocurrency loss... by curuinor on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @12:55PM (#16369160)
So it's hard as hell?
Re:Bad code may be to blame for $500M of cryptocurrency loss... by mort96 on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @06:30PM (#16371941)
It looks like you're being downvoted, but you're not wrong.

It's easy for most people to keep their personal data safe, because they're not targeted by attackers because there's little of value. It's hard for people whose sensitive data is valuable to keep it secure; if valuable white house secrets were stored with my strategies for protecting my personal sensitive data, they'd have been leaked ages ago.

Once your sensitive data is highly valuable, like if you store a decent amount of cryptocurrencies (or is an attractive female with private nude pictures[0] or have a big YouTube channel[1]), protecting sensitive data from the likely targeted attacks is hard.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud_leaks_of_celebrity_phot... (I'm not sure if there was monetary value in those pictures, but they certainly had other forms of value.)

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlcAHkjbARs (He talks a lot about unrelated (to this discussion) about his Amazon links; go to 3 minutes in for the discussion about being compromised.)