Also, for all those people that vouch for anarchy but do have Bitcoins.... Do you really think you would be able to keep hodling them when someone went to beat you to death until you gave your private keys to them... because they have the "means" and "freedom" to take it from you?
Someone stole 85 bitcoins from me, I let the localbitcoins community know what/who to watch out for. The only response the police gave me was seizing all of my computers/cell phones/money and investigating me for money laundering.
After over a year they finally returned everything to me (everything useless because I already had to replace everything plus who knows what they added to all of my devices).
My thought on preventing such a thing from happening is some sort of "reputation coin" where everyone has a reputation that can be looked up and anyone who has dealt with that person can report on them (like yelp/ebay). Anyone who is a fraud or violent will be punished by society due to nobody wanting to deal with them and taking precautions when they're around.
I don't know if there is any exact solution, Elwar. Losing 85 bitcoins in one shot is a pretty big deal, and I have suffered some similar losses - but mine was through forced phone porting and simultaneously gaining access to two of my main e-mail accounts.
Localbitcoins, is a tougher deal in terms of dealing directly with the public and also possibly gaining some exposure because these folks learn that you have coins and also might learn too much about your personal details and your possible bitcoin hodlings, and gosh we likely have to take additional precautions regarding how much we expose ourselves and our coins.. and even if it might be inconvenient to NOT store too many coins in such a way such as on local bitcoins or some of the wallets that we might use in our trading?
There are attempts at plausible deniability, too, with some wallets, which maybe relates to how we store our coins, but these various devices and systems are still evolving, and if we want security, we have to learn how to employ these mechanisms in ways that maybe even makes it difficult for ourselves to get easy access to some aspects of our BTC stash.
In late August / early September, there were a couple of weeks in which I removed my localbtc advert because people were acting too crazy, and I was also feeling vulnerable in various regards because of how many coins I had in certain wallets and exchanges, including coins I had on local bitcoins and on my blockchain.info wallet.. and a lot of this additional vulnerability came from what seemed to be a sustained price increase that largely took us from the lower $1k prices to approaching $5k.. and then the small number of coins that I had in some locations, started to look like a lot of money.
So, keeping only a couple of coins in each location could be a partial solution, but it might not prevent nor discourage a more serious and determined attacker with guns and spotlights.. so what to do, what to do,?
and maybe even lessening local bitcoin's profile could be a solution, because even if you can increase your bitcoin holdings every year by trading at a premium, it might not be worth the risk to trade so much on local bitcoins, unless extensive precautions are taken?
I certainly do not have a complete grasp on my various vulnerabilities and there are a couple of places that I likely maintain too many coins, a couple of exchanges, which could cause some problems on various levels whether it is just third party risk or if it is a kind of forced extortion risk (which is probably not a great likelihood, but it becomes a bit of a bigger likelihood when more bad people learn about bitcoin - and we have heard that some people kill over stealing an iphone, so if they can get a hold of 1 bitcoin, they might engage in worse actions to extort... and at what point are we safe? And what are good measures to take?
These are likely ongoing questions that we need to figure out including figuring out successorship issues too.. because it would be sad to accumulate a lot of coins, and then no one in the family gets access to them because they cannot figure out holding amounts nor passwords nor other security measures.. OMG.