Inputs.io was recently hacked, and this points to the increasingly urgent problem of online storage of assets. Having to place trust in an online, pseudo-anonymous third-party is going back to centralized banking without the legal protections that traditional banking has. Hardware wallets, or revolutionary new ways of holding money online safely are long overdue. A wallet based on a mobile phone, with strong linkage to the phone number may be a valid solution, because the way M-PESA works depends on phone number as the security.

A MAC address can also be a unique identifier to tie a wallet to, ensuring that it can only be used from a particular device or list of devices. Such measures may make the stealing of wallets pretty much a pointless exercise.

It may seem that centralization of the bitcoin economy degrades its security by making it an easy target.