I recently updated downward on the important of bitcoin when Brandon Rienhart noted to me that the primary vulnerability with bitcoin is likely to be user vulnerability rather than scheme vulnerability
By “user vulnerability” I take it that you mean that a “hacker” could break into the computer where the bitcoins are stored and steal them.
Well, it is not as if user’s of conventional bank accounts are not similarly vulnerable.
Of course, but in general I would expect it to be more difficult to hack into an organization that can afford to spend more resources on security than on one who can afford to spend less.
You didn’t read the linked Wired article: $50 million was stolen from banks’ customers by obtaining online-banking-account passwords by surreptitiously installing evesdropping software on the customers’ computers. When the customer discovers the theft, the bank responds by saying that the customer is out of luck, and unless the customer can show that the bank did not follow the (regrettably insecure) standard procedures used in online banking, the courts side with the bank.
The reason I entered this thread in the first place was to point out that conventional online banking might not leave the average person less vulnerable to theft than dealing in bitcoins (even if in theory the difficulty of anonymity in the conventional online banking sector makes it easier to recover stolen money). At least the authors of the standard Bitcoin client had the good sense not to build on one of the most insecure parts of the software on a modern computer (the web browser) which is more than we can say for all the U.S. banks I know about.
By “user vulnerability” I take it that you mean that a “hacker” could break into the computer where the bitcoins are stored and steal them.
Well, it is not as if user’s of conventional bank accounts are not similarly vulnerable.
Of course, but in general I would expect it to be more difficult to hack into an organization that can afford to spend more resources on security than on one who can afford to spend less.
You didn’t read the linked Wired article: $50 million was stolen from banks’ customers by obtaining online-banking-account passwords by surreptitiously installing evesdropping software on the customers’ computers. When the customer discovers the theft, the bank responds by saying that the customer is out of luck, and unless the customer can show that the bank did not follow the (regrettably insecure) standard procedures used in online banking, the courts side with the bank.
The reason I entered this thread in the first place was to point out that conventional online banking might not leave the average person less vulnerable to theft than dealing in bitcoins (even if in theory the difficulty of anonymity in the conventional online banking sector makes it easier to recover stolen money). At least the authors of the standard Bitcoin client had the good sense not to build on one of the most insecure parts of the software on a modern computer (the web browser) which is more than we can say for all the U.S. banks I know about.
You’re right, I’ll have to think about that.