[nextaccountic]

he should been using a hardware wallet

and the bulk of it should be on a paper wallet, in the vault of a bank or another real world institution. the hardware used to generate this key should be wiped out. so if he followed best practices, he didn't lose this money

edit: just found out that the btc was stolen from a dedicated server on ColoCrossing. this makes no freaking sense. no server connected to internet should have access to the keys to your btc (or access to any keys that could be used to later on grab cryptocurrency keys). hot wallets should be hardware wallets, cold wallets should be acid free paper

[paulpauper]

Yes, he likely made a fundamental rookie error. Large sums should be stored completely offline.

[treeman79]

How on earth are normal people supposed to trust bit coin. When best practice is to treat it like paper money.

[thebeardisred]

Technically, it's more like "treat it like any non-fungible asset".

Plenty of "normal people" use combinations of physical security to protect their assets. Safes, deposit boxes, tamper proof materials etc.

[throwaway290]

What... paper money and gold bars are non-fungible now?

[wesapien]

As others have said, he for whatever reason had a completely lazy setup for someone who develops for Bitcoin Core. He doesn't even use a hardware wallet or use a separate computer for his BTC bag or other sensitive data.

[paulpauper]

If BTC is $1/coin , it is fine to not be paranoid. $16,000+ changes the game completely.

[hgsgm]

That's not how it works at all. "Bitcoin" is just a unit of measure, except for the brief moment of mining a new one. Would you be less paranoid if your savings were denominated in pennies vs dollars?