Vladimir Law: "chances of a 3rd party running away with your bitcoins asymptotically approaches 100% over time"
"run away" includes "getting 'hacked'"
It is basically the same as amount of mined bitcoins asymptotically approaches 21 million.
People! FFS! Figure out brainwallets, paper wallets and best of all truecrypt containers, preferably with a hidden partition and decoy partition and standard bitcoin-qt with encrypted wallet.dat. Do not forget your pass phrases but still use very strong ones.
Store not only encrypted images but truecrypt distribution/installation too.
This is all you need to know and do.
Remember risk management formula: Risk = Asset * Vulnerability * Threat. This means you can trust 3rd parties for small amount of BTC for short time. The smaller the amount and the shorter the time, the better. In this case Risk is acceptable. For large amounts and long time you simply cannot trust 3rd parties without taking on disproportional risks.
Too bad nobody is gong to listen to the above. No matter how often I (and others) repeat it. So fuck you, you deserve all your coins to be stolen eventually then.
I hate blaming the victims, but people you should have more sense. Phinnaeus Gage, I am really sorry, hopefully it was a trivial amount.
Spot on, and did not take offense, bud. All others feel free to stick it up me, but at least ask me if I want to taste it when you do.
Although this hurts me financial, it's not drastic, but this is a major blow to Bitcoin on several levels. Not in my wildest dreams I thought InstaWallet would go down, but looking back I should have thought otherwise. In fact, for a brief second I did about a week or so ago, but was assured that all is well, opting to not look deeper and explore my options further.
Without disclosing what this idiot had at InstaWallet, I could've easily purchased a house due to the recent exchange rate increase. Today, I don't have a single satoshi to my name, all because I never took the time to set up a secure wallet whether it be a paper wallet (no fuckin' idea what that's all about) or on a USB stick or downloading the client on some off-the-grid computer.
I'll just say that the Bitcoin-QT wallet is incredibly easy to set up (pretty much just click install, and it's done), and it is reasonably secure once you password protect it. The downside is just that it takes a number of hours to synchronize, and it does take up some ram and a decent amount of HDD space. But that's a small sacrifice to make to have full control over your coins.
Davout seems to be a standup guy. I'd be surprised if you didn't get the vast majority of your funds back, given how much of instawallet's funds were sitting in a cold wallet. But certainly, put more effort into making sure your coins are secure down the road, especially when you have enough to buy a house with!