Topic: Bitcoin Theft vs. Fiat Theft Levels? (Read 1580 times)

I don't we have to worry with this. Thiefts will always exists no matter what, so what we should look is for solutions, and good exchanges like Gemini are on the ways, and good storage solutions like Xapo as well.

well ... counting gox and depending on where you estimate their massive 1 billion fake-dollars ponzi fraud theft at ... plus the other literally hundreds of thefts / frauds at this point in bitcoin's short history ... all added up ... has been estimated at over 1 million directly stolen or otherwise fraudulently obtained bitcoins (out of the current supply of 14 million) ... that works out to a little over 7% of the entire monetary supply being stolen ... some of which has of course been re-sold at this point ... but to put this in real world terms ... if 7% of the fiat currency value of earth were stolen outright (which has an estimated global value of 75trillion , give or take a couple trillion) ... it'd be the equivalent of 5.5trillion dollars stolen from earth's entire monetary supply ... or put another way , roughly 1/2 of all the money in the U.S. (banks included) ... or put another way , roughly 1/3 of all the money in china (banks included) ... or put another way , every dime from the entire economy of all of france and the U.K. combined (banks included) ... or put another way , roughly $800 stolen out of the pocket of every man woman and child on earth (of course most people on earth don't even have that much to steal , so it'd probably be more like $100,000 out of the pocket of every man woman and child living in 1st world developed areas who have adequate money to steal $100,000 from) ... stupid fucking question ... the answer is blatantly obvious ... bitcoin theft levels are *extremely* much more than fiat theft levels ... do you drive a car you own / own and use a computer daily / have indoor plumbing ? did you have $100,000 stolen from you in the last 5 years ? NO ? not *every single person you know* in your family , every one of your coworkers , every neighbor you have in your neighborhood or building , and friends (if any) got $100,000 stolen from them in the last 5 years ? NO ? ... of course not ... and by the way ... most of the global monetary supply is held in the ledgers of banks anyway and backed by some % held in highly secure james bond villian style vaults, so realistically , if you wanted to steal fiat $ in an equivalency to the amount of theft that has taken place in the bitcoin world , you'd have to steal from every person on earth every single physical dollar euro yuan ruble and seashell currently in active circulation on earth AND rob 1,000,000 banks successfully of all of their on-hand currency ... santa couldn't do it with magic ...

obviously more fiat thefts because there's more fiat .. fiat is also less traceable than bitcoin, assuming it's in the form of cash

Well we know that Fiat is stolen on a much higher level than Bitcoins. 

moral of the story..

results show that after centuries of bank notes existence 600,000 incidences of pickpocketing still occurs every year in just the UK
http://www.clevertravelcompanion.com/blogs/news/8681561-some-pickpocketing-stats-and-facts

In the future we'll have professional solutions if one is scared to keep their own Bitcoin, like Xapo which seems legit. If they lose your bitcoin it's their fault.

Most of the bitcoins are honest, while all of the dollars are theft

And don't forget that they can also steal it physicaly like in form of wallet or directly at your bank by changing the control panel into one modified with keylogger, belive me i've seen this.

People can steal fiat electronically in similar or analogous ways.

Bitcoin thefts are this high because it is so dead easy to steal Bitcoins. You can literally exploit security breaches or holes in the software to steal the coins. Also you can fool people into sending you their coins -> in an irreversible manner, which makes things even worse!

One difference : Bitcoin theft can be an internal strategy if a firm is running out of business like the gox but fiat theft  cant be that shady bcoz their law enforcements to track the case.

[Edit] So that brings about the need for money tracking agency like the Homeland security for bitcoins?

Well, at least everyone agrees with me that it would be hard to measure. 

Actually this is stupid statement...you may get fiat stolen in paper form or in form of credit card also...or you can get your whole wallet stolen with both and credit cards.

Bitcoin thefts have a way more weight of impact on its price than fiat thefts.

Well for me to get a rough figure, I would take the crash that happened in around 2007 to 2009 where a few of the banks just suddenly go bankrupt. For me, I will call that a theft as well because of those poor souls who put their hard-earned cash inside the banks and the funds just disappear with it.

It's impossible to compare because of lack of data.
Sometimes, we hear that some hackers have stolen money but the banks do not publish any detail.

Then, when it comes to the theft of banknotes, no one has worldwide statistics.

Yep. Not to mention the bitcoin price fluctuations. A bitcoin theft valued at a million dollars in late 2013 would be less than half that now. What I do know is bitcoin thefts are relatively small fry compared to fiat thefts. Same goes for the comparisons of the percentage of bitcoin spent to buy drugs as opposed to fiat drug purchases. Bitcoin's use is still tiny in comparison.

There is no way to know about it really and we may never know and probably won't know actual numbers of stolen coins. It is strange  to compare bitcoin  with fiat. There a too much of a difference there. Are we talking about only Dollars here? Or every fiat as general? It does not matter tho as we simply can't check this thing out.

I think it is impossible to calculate out the exact figure of the theft levels. But we should keep in mind that stealing is human nature, which can be bitcoin, fiat, or whatever at least has some values. It is not the fault of the bitcoin itself.

You aren't going to get exact numbers because there are many variables.
Fiat theft is institutionalized and guaranteed to happen 100% these days. Bitcoin is different because it has voluntary and a well understood disinflationary curve that we all agree to beforehand. Theft may increase to levels as high as fiat with bitcoin if we ever decide to increase the 21 million limit but doing so would be our own undoing and very unlikely to occur.