[pja]

By doing this, you've turned your local hard drive and the backups you made from it into an extraordinarily valuable object, thus massively increasing the incentive to steal it.

"But wait!" you say, "I shall use modern cryptography to protect my wealth from prying eyes!" Yes, and the thief in the night will use rubber hose cryptography on you.

There is a reason why the vast majority of people entrust their wealth to banks & not a safe buried under the floor of their house. I'm sure the BitCoin community will learn this truth about monetary systems at roughly the same rate as they've learnt all the others & probably the hard way given recent evidence.

[jnbiche]

Out of all of the many security incidents we've experienced in Bitcoin's short but eventful lifespan, not a single one has involved anything like rubber hose cryptoanalysis. This in spite of the fact that numerous public Bitcoin figures are known to be millionaires many time over.

Why is this? Well, if you choose to "use rubber hose cryptography" on someone to steal their Bitcoins, you've graduated from a faceless, online, white collar crime that many police departments won't even take a report for ("they've stolen your Bitwhats? Yeah, we'll get back to you.") to an extremely serious crime that will get you locked up in violent prisons for a very long amount of time in every country of the world.

So it's not surprising that the scenario you describe has not happened. It may happen yet, but it will be a rarity and not a statistically-meaningful threat.

[rayiner]

I don't think physical bitcoin muggings should be crimes for police to handle. Let's see how deep the anarchist rabbit hole goes. Not much of a "trust less" system if its all backed up with guys with guns anyway.

[dllthomas]

My issue with this is what is the response when someone says "give me your bitcoins" and the other person replies "I don't have any." You're going to clearly be hitting people who are not wanting to participate in your experiment.

[M4v3R]

It still centralizes risk by putting it all on yourself. There were MANY cases of Bitcoin theft from user computers - allinvain's 20k theft among others. This is by far not the best way yo store Bitcoins.

[epsylon]

On yourself? No need to.

Print 3 copies of paper wallet. Store in 3 different bank vaults.

[M4v3R]

Yes. And only one of them needs to be compromised for you to lose funds (given that you didn't use multisig). Or if your computer was compromised at the time of generating your paper wallets. Or the printer. Or if you somehow downloaded a malicious copy of wallet generating software. And so on, and so on...

[epsylon]

> And only one of them needs to be compromised for you to lose funds (given that you didn't use multisig)

Bank vaults are very rarely compromised. And as you said you can still use multisig.

> Or if your computer was compromised at the time of generating your paper wallets. Or the printer. Or if you somehow downloaded a malicious copy of wallet generating software.

If you factor malicious software into account, you're far more likely to have your credit card or bank account credentials stolen.

Cold storage surely isn't a panacea, but let's be honest in the criticism of BTC. With reasonable security standards your bitcoins are probably safer than your bank account money. (The only difference is that your BTC's probably aren't insured against theft)

[M4v3R]

My computer was compromised once, and I consider myself tech-savvy. I don't use Windows as well. Two of my collegueges lost BTC due to computer compromise as well. Now imagine what happens to people that know close to nothing about security.

[merloen]

Civilized countries don't have violent prisons.

[jnbiche]

Agree 100%. Can you point to a country that doesn't have violent prisons? If so, I'll change that to "most countries".

[FBT]

Yeah, we know already that the US isn't a civilised country, you don't have to rub it in.

[moe]

Yes, and the thief in the night will use rubber hose cryptography on you.

Yes, that's not absurd at all. These blockchain-monitoring, bitcoin-wallet correlating cyber-thieves with their rubberhoses are a real plague.

It's just so much easier than, say, robbing people near an ATM at gunpoint...

[nhaehnle]

> rubber hose cryptography

Shouldn't that really be rubber hose cryptanalysis?

[pja]

Probably!

[meerita]

Why not saving all in a good USB storage, go to a bank, open a vault, store it. It's almost imposible break trought and get robbed. You only operate from bank, then move it back to the vault. That if you're too paranoid.