[vijayboyapati]

It's important to distinguish the crimes that happen involving theft of bitcoin, from bitcoin as a payment system and protocol. Do you know how many crimes happen per day involving dollars? It's many orders of magnitude more than bitcoin related crimes. Just sayin'

edit: a word

[PeterisP]

These crimes don't point to a weakness of technical protocol, but they do point out to a weakness in bitcoin as an unregulated payment system.

If you want to do business in such a system, then you must rely only on yourself and keep in mind the risks from counterparties and intermediaries that are significantly different than for "normal" currencies.

For example, if you want to wire $10 000 to someone, you can basically ignore risks of someone stealing it in the middle; if you want to give someone $10 000 worth of bitcoin - then if any intermediaries are involved, you'd have to check them yourself. If a regulated financial institution holds $10 000 of your money, you can pretty much ignore risks of it going bankrupt; but if an unregulated money transmitter holds your bitcoins or cash in the same amount, and they go insolvent or fraudulent, then your funds are gone.

[nolok]

> Do you know how many crimes happen per day involving dollars? It's many orders of magnitude more than bitcoin related crimes. Just sayin'

This is true, yet means absolutely nothing. You're using absolutes when you should be using relatives.

If in a pool A of a hundred transactions one is a fraud, and in a pool B of ten thousands transactions a hundred are frauds, both pool present the same risk of a transaction being a fraud despite one having orders of magnitude more frauds than the other.

[vijayboyapati]

Using relatives is fine; my only point is that bitcoin is new and interesting and newsworthy and the negatives tend to get focused on. I honestly do not think that crime is more rampant in the bitcoin economy than the dollar economy. And this is just considering financial theft, and not institutionalized crime - e.g., innumerable instances of malfeasance committed by large banks or the wholesale robbery of the population through inflation of the dollar. Considered in total, I think bitcoin represents a far more honest and less crime-prone monetary system.