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by elcct 3437 days ago
Yeah, if you freeze your own wallet somehow :)
1 comments

The kind of things I've seen reported on /r/bitcoin:

- lose key to wallet

- lose wallet due to inadequate backups

- lose contents of "brainwallet" due to weak password

- lose wallet/contents due to malware targeting bitcoin

- lose wallet/contents due to bug in client software (recommendations change frequently)

- send to merchant, defrauded in the old-fashioned way

- keep on exchange for trading, exchange collapses

- erroneously swap transaction value and transaction fee, or other fat-finger errors

- erroneously send to wrong or non-existent target address

It's like dropping your phone in the toilet. You never think it'll happen to you... until one day...
Many of these can be prevented by multisig and/or a hardware wallet with the seed phrase tucked away.

Sending to the wrong address can be fixed with smart contracts that associate addresses with easier identifiers. Swapping value/fee can be prevented with a simple safety check in the client software, to make sure the fee is reasonable.

We are still at the beginnings. With Bitcoin you are your own bank and some people are not used to have such responsibility and freedoms it gives.
one of the pro-consumer features of the regular banking system is that it is possible to undo mistakes

not possible with bitcoin

It is possible, but sometimes it is not. If you sent money to wrong account, bank can't just take it back from other party account.

On the other hand, I by mistake sent bitcoin to a wrong address and couldn't believe that someone who owned that address sent me all bitcoins back week or so later. There are good souls out there :)