[fixermark]

Given that BTC is a currency that is not backed by a national treasury (and is, in fact, technologically not backable by printing more money), such insurance would be a prohibitively expensive percentage of a company's BTC resources.

The same features of BTC that serve as its advantage and, arguably, goal make it more difficult to offer basic protections that other fiscal infrastructures have had for decades.

[aianus]

You can store $100m in bitcoin on a piece of paper in a vault. It reduces perfectly to the solved problem of securing $100m in $100 bills in a vault (which, yes, you can insure).

[fixermark]

While true, that does not offer the same protection as an FDIC-style insurance program (and restricts the storing entity's ability to compete and perform by preventing them from investing that $100m, so the market will tend ceteris parabus to punish companies that take such a step in good times with relatively-slower growth, acting as a disincentivizing counter-weight to offering insurance). In contrast, the FDIC has unlimited borrowing capacity with the US government; worst-case scenario, the Treasury can basically start printing money and the FDIC can hand it out to people with savings in failed banks.

Many see this capacity of the US Treasury to fabricate money from nowhere as the very sort of flaw that BTC's coin-generation process is intended to avoid, but that protection does not come without a price.

[xixi77]

Since this is about an amount of $100m, I'd say the above suggestion (theoretically) offers much more protection than FDIC, which only covers losses up to $250k iirc...

I suspect that at the moment it may be more difficult to find an insurer for a vault with that piece of paper, compared to a vault with $100m cash though :) but perhaps that'll change.

[dragonwriter]

> While true, that does not offer the same protection as an FDIC-style insurance program

Sure, but whether that difference from "the same protection" is more or less protection depends on the number of people that $100 million is held on behalf of.

[bduerst]

That's security, not insurance.

FDIC-style insurance is for when the security is breached, not if.