Topic: Freedom and Responsibility - or: why you FAILED if you lost money in MBC crash - page 4. (Read 9403 times)

That is what (encrypted) backups are for, something I explain to everyone who cares enough. And some of those who don't.
As far as I am aware you need to make a backup 'every 100 addresses' because the Bitcoin client pregenerates 100 bitcoin addresses and always makes sure there are 100 in reserve. This is perfectly feasible, especially for a beginning user who doesn't use it a lot yet.
That is always an issue - in fact, while if you are running Bitcoin on your own computer you can just keep it in an encrypted unmounted volume while not in use, for an exchange or ewallet the wallet file is always accessible because otherwise the site wouldn't function.
Yes.
What if you lose your ewallet password?
Not really. It just takes some time and effort to properly help people in setting it up.

My point is that it is better to be constructive.

His solution "keep it on a local machine" is just as bad advice (at least for most people). What if your  hdd crashes? Do you make backups? After every send? Are they stored safe enough or can other people find it there? Do you encrypt it? What if you lose the key?

And so on. This is a hard problem.

Most solutions that work against loss do not work against theft, and vice verse.

To prevent losing your wallet you want to mirror and distribute it to as many places as possible. However, to keep it from being stolen/hacked you want to put it only in one place and heavily encrypt it.

Not at all. I am being critical. I have told many people over the time to not rely on ewallets, especially not on MyBitcoin after a load of accounts got cleared out, and pretty much everyone had the same response: "it won't be that bad". I am not talking to the people who got their funds stolen in the first place (they could not possible have known that something like that could happen), I am talking to those who *despite* that STILL stored a considerable amount of funds with MyBitcoin after it has been PROVEN to be unsafe.

If a situation would occur where I could have known that something would go wrong, and I ignored that situation and got burnt - you and everyone else has all the right to tell me that. Sometimes things go wrong, but if you *know* that something is going on, or that something does not have proper security measures, and you are still blindly trusting it, you are making a massive mistake. People just shake it off and say "it won't happen again" or "it can't get that bad", completely ignore all warning signs, and go on with their business. I hope that this kind of message will actually make people think about it and realize what they are doing, and I hope that in the process it saves a few 'victims'.

And yes, I am being extremely offensive in my way of typing at times, but only if I have a good reason for that - in this case that reason is that I hope that people will actually realize what they are doing, rather than forgetting about it and making the same mistakes over and over again. Trust me, I'm really not doing this because I like to 'make myself feel superior' or anything along those lines.

I have already contributed to the problem several times by advising people over and over to NOT rely on webwallets as all of the current solutions lack proper security (two factor auth anyone? - excluding Mt. Gox on this one), and by helping people to secure their stuff.

They did earn some amount of trust for existing so long, but it would have been crazy for anyone to store more than 50 BTC there. Why would you trust so much money to some anonymous service with a bad reputation?

There is a strong demand for a reputable Bitcoin bank. If I wasn't busy with other projects, I would definitely gather investments and start one. There's a lot of money to be made.

I beg to differ based on the first amendment. He can say whatever he chooses and I suggest you reread his first sentence.

+1 for joespie91 AND +1 for John Smith.  I feel that they both make some good points.

I think there are a whole lot of possible tests that each one of us would fail and there is a realistic possibility of any number of them coming to pass.

Yeah.

agree +1

+1

So... now you're gloating that lots of people lost their coins and you still have them? Do you feel proud? Do you feel lucky? Should we be laughing if you fail the next "test"?

It's already bad enough, there is no need for a zillion topics rubbing it in to them. It has already happened, and the people involved are obviously aware that they made a mistake.

There is no need for rude and unfriendly comments like yours. Can we at least pretend to keep the community a nice place?

Storing your wallet in a safe way (both against theft and loss) is not exactly easy nor user friendly at the moment. Even for the tech-savy it's hard. Please contribute to solving this problem instead of kicking dead horses...

Before I start, this topic is not intended as trolling. I am entirely serious, and I hope I can wake up some people and make them realize what they are doing.

Bitcoin is about freedom. Freedom to do with your funds what you want. To store them in a way you want, in a way you deem them secure, without having to rely on a third party.

With freedom comes responsibility. Responsibility to take care of the security of your own funds, or to pick a provider you trust and have them take care of it.

If the MyBitcoin crash was a responsibility test, and you lost any considerable amount of money in there, YOU FAILED THE TEST.

Please explain to me how you had the idea that it was a good idea to store considerable funds in a service that has a proven poor track record - remember how hundreds of accounts were cleaned out, all to the same address, and not a single automated red flag regarding fraud was triggered, letting through all the payments? How such an obvious fraudulent transaction went through, and was claimed to have been 'stopped manually', with no real security measures in place? Remember how noone actually appears to really be running the site, and how it is rather 'faceless'? Why would you store any considerable amount of money there? Why did you not store (the majority of) it in a properly secured wallet.dat file on a local machine?

Even if this was not intended as a test, it was a very good one, and you definitely failed it if you indeed lost serious funds.

Just something to think about.