Topic: Trust No One - page 94. (Read 161312 times)

I somehow agree with this, but then the whole idea of the anonymous trade stops working. There must be other methods that don't include giving personal informarion.

The amount of BTC proportional to the amount of paranoia or viceversa

What's the point of bitcoin if you have to be so paranoid?

I've secured my wallet as suggest by the wiki, I believe, but I feel I need to take that extra step and use something like TrueCrypt to further secure it. But then there is the issue of mounting and unmounting the encrypted image when appropriate.

good thread.

Exactly.  Immediately after accepting that, still remain vigilant. 

Oh yay, I'm so paranoid now! Actually, my first password ever to my first e-mail account was Tru5tN01, so I have probably been paranoid for awhile.

lol, love it, and very true to an extent.

No trouble to have a joint account sitting on an encrypted disk that needs 2 keyfiles to open.

I read in a book once: "I don't trust anybody I don't know, and I treat everybody like I don't know them"

I'd approach every new thing with a lack of trust, and let that trust be earned.

(Kind of like the forum does with newbies. )

I am a naturally trusting person, and I suppose looking at this bitcoin thing, I set up some pc's, they make me money, WTF? 
Where I live money is fairly easy to come by, just takes a bit of work.
This doesn't even require work 
At the end of the day, any system, anyone, anywhere can get ripped off.
I think people invest too heavily in "securing wealth" instead of, I dunno, spreading it so other people don't need to steal it =/
I'm no expert, but I'd say that this entire economy might be somewhat influenced by politics. i.e. if America, the EU, or any other county has a problem with the BTC economy, and decide to make it illegal, price drops.
If too many countries crack down, I can't see BTC being the best investment =(
Hope I'm wrong, 'cos I wanna stack the skrilla with you boys yo', but, like with any currency I guess, there is always the presence of imminent failure.
Having said that, I would like to thank dacoinminster for his excellent thread and information, which is very informative, and I have taken much of it on board.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, at the end of the day, it's just money =/

On a side note, just had an idea, dunno if someone cleverer than me already came up with it, or if it's possible (can't think of why it shouldn't be), but, would it be possible to attach two, or even more passwords to a bitcoin wallet, so for joint accounts all parties must enter their own passwords?

Good point. However, that is optional trust. The whole point of cryptocurrencies, and thus Bitcoin, is that you aren't FORCED to trust anyone. Also, an economy only requires people to trust that others will act in their own self-interest. Being trustworthy is good for business, if the system is good. The optimal system is where all people's best interests are mutual, therefore, no conflict/crime.

"trust noone" is bullshit. grow some balls, trust some people and take risks. otherwise we're getting nowhere: everyone just sitting on his rotten pile. money must flow, otherwise it's not money.

An economy is people working together, having ideas, producing stuff, investing their money. How is that supposed to work if noone trusts anyone?

Thanks for the common sensical advice!

Thanks good advice

People should exercise prudence and trust no one.  Both are vitally important. 

Let us also not forget what the ancients enjoined "Know thyself." 

Be Careful would be the best advice instead of trust no one.

Nice post dacoinminster and I agree with most of your points, though I believe that there are levels of trust. All depends on the "volume". I wouldn't go to the supermarket carrying 10000 euros on me so the same goes with Bitcoin... I wouldn't use the "big" (or "savings" if you prefer) wallet to make transactions all over the internet. A hosted wallet service is quite OK as well, if you use it for "pocket money" transactions.

Now check this out https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.783854

The title of this thread is provocative, but is a bit of nonsense too. I view it more as rhetorical questions being posed.

Trust.
The majority of users engaged in BTC related activity haven't audited the source code of the programs they rely on to 1) generate 2) store and 3) exchange their BTC with. By audit I mean they have read the source code and understand the implications. Thoroughly. I certainly haven't.

So fundamentally this isn't about a lack of trust, just who/what do you trust? What criteria are we using to determine that something is deserving of our trust? Fanboy forum posts? Paranoiacs with aversions to sunlight, pop music and anything smacking of public policy? We all have our "reasoning" but is it consistent? Why does it work? Given that the technologies we rely on to "guarantee" trust in BTC have been created by competent programmers who understand the minutiae of their work, we are by default already trusting quite a few people before we even get started. Complete strangers in most cases. BTC was "founded" by who exactly? Satoshi Nakamoto?  And it doesn't ultimately matter as the process has begun and now we (collectively) are its users, owners, developers, detractors, consumers.

So by participating in BTC you all trust a fictitious character. Didn't your mother ever tell you not to accept candy from strangers? In order for BTC to continue we as participants in this experiment have to trust each other. Otherwise the coin won't flow. However we don't want to give it away for free and have all those hard earned BTC disappear in a poof of misspent kilowatt hours so...

Security.
How to prevent digital pickpockets? Networked resources are more vulnerable than non-networked. Keeping that thumb drive off networked resources might be a reasonable start. Is it enough? Probably not. Encryption might be worthwhile too. Ghost partitions seem like a nice touch. These are still susceptible to the original, old school brute force attack: some thug standing over you threatening your life or that of loved ones if you don't provide access to your wealth. Good thing for us, this is highly unlikely as the intellectual/cultural barrier makes the general public fairly ignorant of the ins & outs of this community (and I'm a 1337th level paladin who can see the future). If you really want to establish an index of risk for losing your cryptowealth by threat of violence, perhaps you can start here http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr/. I think healthy paranoia is useful, unqualified paranoia is science fiction. I'm a fan of scifi but there has to be a reasonable limit. I guess the question here is what's reasonable? I think we can park threat of violence and safe deposit box theft in the "low risk" category for the most part.
 
My guess is that the biggest threat of digital pickpocketing comes from within the BTC community itself. This is the population that actually knows 1) of BTC and 2) more about the tools of the trade and how they work (though perhaps I shouldn't give too much credit on that second point, see comment on auditing above under "Trust". An aside here: aren't we vulnerable to the programmers of these tools we use to the extent that we trust them?). The system at present puts a premium on anonymity. I like that feature, not sure if it helps in terms of knowing who just pilfered my BTC wallet. Also seems easier to prosecute someone with a name instead of a hash string with a series of associated dotted quads. How to audit the system to ensure that the BTC I claim were stolen were actually stolen? How to ensure that they were legitimately released from my wallet? How to determine that I am not lying in order to cheat the system? Even if a copy of my BTC wallet is liberated without my consent, can good encryption buy me enough time to reset all my passwords and recover my dough? Which tools do we trust? Truecrypt? Gnupg? RSA (proprietary I know)?

Seems like a rehash of some points others here have more concisely stated. Am interested in your thoughtful responses.

Yes, they've been hacked in the past; maybe more than once or twice.

But most problems with crypto currency exchanges come down to "how secure is your password&the computer you use to access the services". Typical hack looks like "someone logged in and sent my btc to *address*". No, keeping funds in usd will not help either. For some reason exchanges don't implement additional auth for money transfers which could partially help in such situations