Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: Here is a real bubble - gold
by
hollowframe
on 15/07/2014, 00:05:16 UTC
gold is worse since you have to kept them safe, everyone can robb you the gold.

And bitcoin can't be stolen, right? Grin
Both bitcoin and gold can be stolen, however it is much easier to secure bitcoin then it is to secure gold. Not only that but if you know that your gold is close to being compromised then if you try to move your gold your chances of it being stolen are higher while if your bitcoin was close to being stolen then you could likely solve move attacks by simply moving your bitcoin to another address; both scenarios assume that you are aware of the pending attack.

It isn't easy to secure bitcoin. Cold storage can have corruption, paper wallet can get eating by insect.

I think that securing bitcoin is actually more difficult than securing gold. There are a lot more possible ways to loose your bitcoin (lost passwords, hardware failure, hacking, weak random number generator, social engineering) than loosing the gold. Bitcoin can even get stolen without the thief needing to be at the same place with the victim. So I think the non-physical nature of bitcoin actually adds risk. The less tech-savvy a person is, the higher the risk of loss.
You could potentially test your RNG prior to using it for generating a private key to make sure it really is random.

If you were to diversify your backups of your wallet in both location and method of backing up then it would be unlikely that all your backups would be lost.

As long as you don't use a brain wallet a thief would either need physical access to the harddrive/usb/paper that holds your wallet or digital access to the cloud service provider that holds your backup.

It would not be possible to seize someone's bitcoin without the private key. It is possible for gold to be seized.