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Re:Coinbase (YC S12), First Crowd Funded Bitcoin Company, Ra... by mey on Wednesday September 26, 2012 @07:15PM (#4578507)
This is the downside of Bitcoin's operating in a cash like nature. There is no FDIC for these "banks", the bank walls are digital and porous in ways unknown, and the bank can be robbed across international boundaries. What these companies need is insurance, but that insurance would be very hard/impossible to obtain.
Re:Coinbase (YC S12), First Crowd Funded Bitcoin Company, Ra... by Dylan16807 on Wednesday September 26, 2012 @07:26PM (#4578549)
On the plus side, the way transactions work, the vault never needs to be connected to any networks at all. Hot storage is risky but cold storage is extremely safe.
Re:Coinbase (YC S12), First Crowd Funded Bitcoin Company, Ra... by jlgreco on Wednesday September 26, 2012 @07:33PM (#4578576)
I think this could be fairly easily harnessed in a semi-scalable manner too.

Two computers, A is trusted and B is untrusted. B is networked and hooked up with the rest of your system, A is in a vault and completely air-gapped. A has your wallets.

Give both a printer and webcam/scanner to both. B prints a transaction encoded as a QR Code (or something custom, if those don't hold enough data?) as well as key details (transaction amount say) in giant black bold capitalized English.

The human operator checks the english description for sanity, then gives it to computer A. Computer A reads the QR code, does OCR to confirm the key details (or lets the operator confirm them on the screen) and the QR code match, and preforms the transaction.

This could work at a "local bank branch scale" I think, but getting it up to "website scale" would be... improbable.

Not sure if I would trust this with my money, but it would be fun to implement.

(technically A wouldn't be air-gapped, it would just be operating over a QR-code sneakernet.. Should be reasonable though I think.)

Re:Coinbase (YC S12), First Crowd Funded Bitcoin Company, Ra... by gizzlon on Thursday September 27, 2012 @04:20AM (#4579849)
You seem to like "crazy" ideas, for more of them check out the book "Silence on the wire" :)

IIRC, it's possible to create a one-way TP cable. Might be a little more feasible :)

Re:Coinbase (YC S12), First Crowd Funded Bitcoin Company, Ra... by rmc on Thursday September 27, 2012 @06:00AM (#4580043)
The human operator checks the english description for sanity

There's a flaw in your system right there.

Lots of industrial accidents and accidents with computers have been from stupid operators (rather than buggy code per se).

Re:Coinbase (YC S12), First Crowd Funded Bitcoin Company, Ra... by jlgreco on Thursday September 27, 2012 @12:17PM (#4581367)
Of course. But is it worse the flaws with than any business that handles cash? The idea is to use bitcoin's 'offline' functionality to bring it up to about the same security of regular cash.
Re:Coinbase (YC S12), First Crowd Funded Bitcoin Company, Ra... by taligent on Wednesday September 26, 2012 @07:37PM (#4578585)
It's about time that governments actually intervened and forced regulations on any company/entity that deals with Bitcoins.
Re:Coinbase (YC S12), First Crowd Funded Bitcoin Company, Ra... by Dylan16807 on Wednesday September 26, 2012 @08:40PM (#4578765)
What kind of regulations? There are already plenty that affect a company's accounting no matter if it uses dollars or pesos or gold or bitcoins or pokemon cards.