[michaelt]

Given the choice between being hacked, losing your reputation and millions of dollars; or having someone on call 24/7 to move USB sticks across an air gap; I'd choose the latter.

I've seen fast food joints and parking lots with 24/7 attendants, it can't possibly cost more than $100,000 a year.

[dragontamer]

THIS IS THE FUTURE EVERYONE!!!!

The future of modern banking is to return to physical transfer of funds. Instead of relying on modern networking, technology, automation, or websites... we will manually move money over a physical medium.

</sarcasm>

Without automation, how the hell is BTC supposed to be any better than cash?

[apalmer]

Uhhh let me get this right:

$10,000,000 spent to secure a bitcoin exchange to within 99.999% secure via "automation"

$100,000 spent to secure a bitcoin exchange to within 99.999% secure via physical air gap...

which makes more sense

[michaelt]

You can still do automated transactions from your hot wallet - human intervention is only required for transactions that exceed the size of the hot wallet.

And merchants who don't make enough profit to pay $20-$30 an hour to put a human in the loop can have a payment processing company do it.

Don't get me wrong, if you think bitcoin websites have done a superb job at securing their hot wallets [1,2], you're welcome to keep all your money in a hot wallet where it can be 100% cleaned out without a human lifting a finger. Good luck with that.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83794.0 [2] http://fc13.ifca.ai/proc/1-2.pdf

[tlrobinson]

Did you really just suggest trusting millions of dollars of customer funds to the equivalent of minimum wage fast food restaurant employees?