+1

Yeah.

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

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.

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.

AGREED! I too believe people need to be smart about their investments and if they are not smart enough to find someone they trust to be smart enough for them to secure their investment.

Thanks for this thread, I completely agree with you. Storing Bitcoins with a third party is not storing Bitcoins. It’s only trusting that the third party stores them for you.

"Hey, have you heard of this new p2p currency? Noone can seize any funds or revert transactions!
You should buy some and if you’re too lazy to actually handle them, just store them on a shady e-wallet site."


I think it would have been clever to ask/pay someone to create an actually secure wallet for them, or even put up some bounties for easier solutions or whatever. We are not talking about negligible sums here, I have heard a figure of 25k BTC on NPR with regard to what Bruce Wagner had stored their.

PS: I store considerable funds at MtGox, but they have real identities who I trust attached to them, and I feel comfortable with the security measure in form of a Yubikey.

Agreed. If it wasn't for this thread I wouldn't have known I was so quotable as to be part of a sig file.

Like my sig quote(s)? 1Pt1bHvfu9knJfRFMVKLSCEhkhzwhhf3Av

 

Honestly, while he has been harsh the MyBitcoin debacle was something easily predictable. There were several threads in the forums warning about the bad service. Specially about not answering emails. Why would you keep a big part of your bitcoins in a place that does not even answer emails? I dont get it.

People need to understand Bitcoin is not reversable, therefore you need to secure them. Bitcoin has a lot of advantages, non-inflationary (when the first phase is done), decentralized, pseudo-anonymous and not reversable (which is an advantage for a lot of things). But in exchange it has its drawbacks, the main one that you really need to secure them. I try not to leave too much time bitcoins at a third party. I dont even have more than 50 bitcoins in the linux machine I have connected to the Internet all the time. The rest of my bitcoins are offline.

Its not that hard to secure your bitcoins.