In the summer of 2011, when a Mt Gox user's account was hacked and coins stolen
The user was not hacked, the Mt.Goatse itself was hacked.
the result was that trust was lost in Bitcoin itself, plummeting the value
The result was that bitcoin price bubble bursted and speculators did run for the money. They did not trust Bitcoin in first place.
the message heard by many was that the currency was not to be trusted
The retards will listen to anything and not do research themselves. What message they listens is irrelevant.
value and distribution of Bitcoin increases, so does the incentive for evil and theft
Not true. People will steal bitcoins even if they cost pennies. And also will
steal copy the naked pictures from girl computers even if they have no monetary value. And the theft are not purely evil. I call it redistribution of bitcoins. I also want some share!
An encrypted wallet, stored on a computer connected to the internet, is not safe from a rootkit or a keylogger deployed through bundled malware distributed through an exploited website.
There are many diverse ways to distribute malware but You got it right! Encrypted wallets are not safe if computer is infected with malware.
A patient and malicious actor can ultimately do much more to destroy Bitcoin than even a corrupt overreaching government, or a client based software bug can
Totally wrong. It does not make sense at all.
If funds are stolen from a large enough percentage of the user base, we might as well pull the plug on this whole experiment, because the trust will never be repaired. Never.
Try to steal the funds from me or Gavin or any other technically and security savvy person. And even if half of current users lose the coins by theft, the other users will continue to use bitcoins unaffected. I will laugh at them and will trust bitcoins even more, because the attack would be done by exploiting some security weakness in other parts of system, not the bitcoin itself.
The message we are sending to new Bitcoin users is that they should not trust web based wallets with more than a small percentage of their funds
The message was around here for years, even when MyBitcoin and BitcoinLaundry were operational.
coupled with the fact that most people do not have an extra computer that can be permanently left offline, means that right now there is NO good solution for MOST users
Is not that the users fault? Where did the Pentium3s and AMD Duron (Spitfire) computers gone? Because most people in capitalistic consumer society think it is cool to destroy old but perfectly working equipment, now they need to BUY more junk computers such as netbooks to fill role that older systems are perfectly capable of.
Bitcoin desperately needs a trusted bootable operating system that can serve as a better cold storage for a majority of its users
Any operating system that have full disc encryption can be trusted to run on network disconnected computer for offline wallet purposes.
And needs this distribution to be extremely user friendly and robust. I don't personally have experience in creating a customized linux distribution, but I'd like to work with people who do, so that this need can be filled.
"User friendly" and "live Linux distribution" does not mix together. Also the computer must be disconnected from network to be 100% sure it cannot be tampered even when booting liveCD. And even then it will not help if the user is socially engineered to run commands by someone else. As with linux distros there will be more googling for crappy or malicious advice than with windows, there will come greater chance of socially engineering.
To the people placing their trust and wealth in Bitcoin, especially to the least technical amongst them, we owe them a committed effort to protect that trust. Their adoption benefits us, and Bitcoin's success ultimately depends on them
If someone places his wealth in something he don't understand how to properly use and maintain, he is asking for disaster. He either needs to learn about computer security or he needs to find someone who will do it for him. And retards should not use computers at all.