I guess accountants must now be held

..accountable.

you dont need access to the private key to have coins transferred over. you can check to make sure they paid from just looking in the block chain.

Lots of ways. Pretty much, the same way you protect cash. You don't leave large amounts of it in insecure places. You audit accesses to the places you store it. You require multiple approvals for operations.

You have to be joking. Walmart wouldn't put any wallet holding large amounts of money on a computer anyone could copy files from.

Just the tiniest bit of common sense 100% stops this. There are no wallet files, the keys are kept on physically secure devices. Transactions can only come in from approved sources and go through verification and logging before being signed and securely exported. The same way you secure stock transactions. The same way you secure wire transfers.

Your hypothetical does not create a situation in which there is no paper trail.  If the "accountant" has access to a wallet file then you know who has the money, and can prove it in a court of law.

So let's make the hypothetical a little better to address the real issue, and write a movie plot at the same time.

Walmart decides to use bitcoins, to pay for services (note this is an important distinction, if they only accept bitcoins, then only one or a few key stake holders need have access to the wallet file).  Keanu Reeves the top accountant has access to the largest wallet file for payments (he would not have _all_ the money, just the money the owner periodically transfers to a wallet they both have access too adequate for Keanu to conduct business).  

Now Keanu's daughter is kidnapped, and he is told "If you don't transfer 100,000 bitcoins to this addresses within 30 seconds we will kill her. 30, 29, 28..." What do you do? What. Do. You. Do?

Once he transfers the bitcoins they are gone, and both the speed and anonymity unique to bitcoin make catching the criminal at the "hand off" impossible. There is no "hand off".

This is similar to the "perfect crime" scenario outlined in Applied Cryptography page 145.  

However, this is not necessarily a significant advantage. It only improves the executability of the crime in one place the "hand off" which if done properly with cash or other monitory devices is not the weakest part of the crime to begin with.  Also, unlike cash, every transaction that the kidnappers do from that point on with the bitcoin is trackable in the block chain, one wrong step and they will be caught, much more difficult with cash.  Meanwhile all the other weaknesses of the crime, such as being seen kidnapping the daughter, etc. still remain.  

So to answer the question behind your question.  Normal businesses that are mindful of legal and physical security just like they must do now with cash, and accounts and the employees who can access them, will not be exposed to significantly greater risk with bitcoins.  The steps they will need to take to be secure with bitcoins will be different then with cash or accounts, but they are similar and over time will become codified.

It is true that new crimes will be possible with bitcoins that where not possible with cash, credit cards, and banks.  However, that has been true of every major invention throughout time, from the internet and the computer, to the car and printing press before them.  Progress enables.

Bitcoin will not be adopted for what it makes difficult.  It will be adopted for what it makes simple.

j

This creates a paper trail and a "hand off" point, and is quite a bit slower.

Big businesses would require some enterprise bitcoin client solution to be built with tight control of wallets, handling multiple wallets and such.   Current bitcoin client is only acceptable to end-users and small mom and pop shops.

Consider your cell phone company, and how they protect your credit card details from malfeasance of all sorts. Or your doctor, and how they protect your government id #'s from being sold by nurses to identity thieves.


Long story short, all the smart hackers get jobs in white-hat security protecting companies from themselves.

Investigate the scripting capabilities of bitcoin transactions.  You can create transactions that require multiple signatures for the recipient to spend them.  The receiving department of a company could forward incoming payments in such a way that any further spending would require the signature of the CEO, CFO and a number of others as desired.  The current client has no UI to create such transactions, but the scripting capabilities in the block chain allow it.  This feature enables many other interesting possibilities.

Companies will hold their "large wallets" off-site, managed by new companies that form to protect against issues such as those mentioned in the OP.

Many people will get wealthy solving these types of security problems.

for a giant business it would be 1000 times more secure and easier than cash.  No employees would need access to cash, they just accept exact digital payments and verify that they happened.

The customer wont need change.

The employees get paychecks digitally whenever the company decides to pay them.

No need for any traditional manager money handling risks apart from the incredible volatility of the currency/ commodity value.