[mpyne]

> Is massive credit card fraud not a problem? It is a problem for most people, and if not for you, then certainly for the businesses losing 3% to credit transactions on top of all the fraudulent orders.

Fraud happens with Bitcoin too. If anything the Bitcoin economy suffers more from it, the only difference is that chargebacks are not as easily possible with Bitcoin.

Moreover removing chargebacks shifts the burden of fraud from businesses to consumers, who are even less equipped to handle the requirements of detecting fradulent transactions and preventing misuse of their Bitcoin wallets.

How many 47-step "Simple guides to using Bitcoin safely" guides are there on /r/bitcoin now? When Bitcoin experts have to non-ironically suggest sealing off network ports with epoxy to safely use the "Currency of the Internet" that should cause alarms to sound for everyone.

Far from being pro-consumer, Bitcoin is practically the logical conclusion of 'caveat emptor', trying to take Internet-based businesses back to the days before Upton Sinclar's "The Jungle" was published.

Luckily for us, the 2.5-or so transaction per second limit seems to guarantee we won't have to worry about any significant shift to Bitcoin even if people wanted to pay $10/tx fees...

[CyberDildonics]

You have quite a combination of anti-bitcoin posts in your history and half truth straw mans in your post.

I'll give you a guide: download a wallet, choose a password, backup your wallet file. Then don't epoxy any ethernet ports since that is ridiculous.

And work on transaction scaling is far ahead of its need as the current block size is not a hindrance at the current transaction rate, although maybe you actually know that already.

[mpyne]

Is it that simple? The "Basic Bitcoin Security Guide" posted by a /r/bitcoin moderator seems to make it out to be much more complex: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1pxy4w/basic_bitcoi...

Note that this isn't a guide on how to use Bitcoin securely. The guide itself admits right up-front that this is the "20% effort for 80% security" guide, or in other words they have to leave some more advanced stuff out that is still required for security, even if it doesn't represent a large amount of marginal risk.

(P.S. epoxying your ports was mentioned, un-ironically, in an upvoted post in that same thread).

Among the things that a mere mortal has to contend with to use Bitcoin securely (assuming they get the other 20% of what they need to know elsewhere, of course):

* "Unplugging their Internet" to generate a safe wallet password.

* Ensuring their computer is completely secure as well (as pointed out in the section on choosing a software wallet, "They are among the best place to store your money safely (provided your computer is secure as well)").

* Deterministic wallets and other wallets.

* The need to take extra steps to backup wallets if using BitcoinQT

* How to spend money if you're not actually keeping your computer seat warm with mobile/online wallets, with the caveat that you can't actually store any more money in such wallets than "you're prepared to lose".

-- They also point out blockchain.info here for use as online wallets, even though blockchain.info is notoriously insecure compared to other alternatives.

* "Don’t use your online wallets from unsafe computers", which is practically as useless as advice goes as saying "Always carefully read and understand all prompts that a webpage or software program displays before clicking on any buttons, even if closing the prompt is required to proceed to your actual task".

* Advice for cold storage: 'set one up easily by buying an old laptop, reformatting it, installing Linux and a Bitcoin client'. Anyone else remember that time you couldn't safely save USD without buying an old laptop and installing an OS for experts?

> And work on transaction scaling is far ahead of its need as the current block size is not a hindrance at the current transaction rate, although maybe you actually know that already.

Indeed, Bitcoin is in no danger of approaching its practical transaction limits anytime soon given current Bitcoin use growth....