Re: Hur hur hur... Hope none of you used Dropbox to store your wallet!
I was thinking about the issue of protecting bitcoin wallets recently.
My thought was it's not enough to "back up" our wallet. You really need a "bank" (for want of a better word, it's one we all understand).
You want to be able to send your coins to a wallet that you KNOW can't be compromised. You can send coins from your bank to your 'daily' wallet (much like you'd withdraw cash from an ATM).
Depositing is easy. It's the withdrawal that's hard, because any hole in the security would potentially allow someone to steal your coins.
You could create a client that can only send coins to a specified address or addresses. But unless the wallet itself is secure you're still vulnerable.
I'm sure people that are smarter and have more experience than me in security have already mused this over, no doubt someone is cooking up a solution to this already.
You are right. Basically, if could encrypt all day long but the minute your wallet is gone - it is gone. There should be someone fully monitoring these wallets / keeping them in a "bank vault" to only be retrieved when there is a problem such as crashed hd/erased/lost wallet. You realize you can spend coins all day long with the same two wallets ? one being on your computer the other being up on the service - meaning if you lost your wallet you would pull it down from us and it would correct to show you the # of BTC you had at the time. Obviously, trust is the big issue but hopefully "compensation" can negate any of this - or so that is the thinking!
