[MrFantastic]

Cover the branding labels on your bike. The thieves want to steal expensive bikes, not a walmart bike.

I used white engineering reflective tape. They'd have to be very dedicated thief to notice to the Deore XT components.

Plus, the reflective tape is very visible at night.

[olyjohn]

Yeah... this is totally wrong, or maybe it depends on where you live... Here, cheap bikes get stolen all the time. I started riding my heavy-ass, ancient, steel, suspensionless bike that I had bought 20 years prior for like $200 from Target. Not even a pawn shop would want to take the bike, because they are cheap junk. It got stolen from me in less than a week after starting a biking commute. And yes I locked it up. The lock was cut right off.

The thing is people aren't stealing them to always sell them. Sometimes it's just easier to quickly grab a bike when the thief needs to get across town for some other reason. When they get to where they want to go, they just ditch the bike. Sometimes I think some people just want to steal a bike for no real reason.

In Seattle, I've seen gigantic piles with hundred of bikes in them just sitting in a homeless camp. They clearly aren't selling those bikes, as they've been sitting out in the rain for months, or even years now. And I guarantee those homeless camps aren't full of multi-thousand dollar bikes.