Lol. Re: girlfriends - mine kept saying 'what if it's not really open source? What if it's a plot by *insertshit*.
I would say 'no look, here is the source code. Look. It's there. That's it. That's what it is. I can see what it is and what it will do.'
More frustrating than the bear market tbh!
I would say to mine "No one can stop you transacting Bitcoin and there is no power
on earth that can take your coins from you if you store them properly. You can walk with impunity through any customs port in the world. Bitcoin will make mockery of capital controls. Someone just transacted $20,000,000 in a few minutes and paid no fees". She would respond "that's very good my dear...... Where do you want to eat tonight".
Ragnar
NSA back door discovered on all iPhones direct from factory! The scope of these NSA intrusions are not even known yet...
do NOT believe you are safe because you have android phone. the NSA will be able to seize your coins under almost any circumstance, if they wish to. maybe some of the hacks are NSA thefts? how do you know they are not?
Sure, but who said anything about a phone?
NSA has back doors installed in common software as well. Windows, Mac OS X, you better believe it. Any time they want, they can access your PC with a RAT and steal the coins! There is nothing anyone can do!
Is this the currency you would like to trust your life savings too? I think many people prefer cash and traditional banking still!
They're going to steal my coins that are on a machine running an open source OS, open source wallet, that doesn't have wifi?
OK, how... and then... why?
Heyhey, security specialist here,
How about modifying hardware chips at a major supplier to mess with the entropy of the pseudorandom number generator of your system. Then, with a significantly smaller possible key-space only known to the attackers, regenerate keys and find balances to swipe.
In this case your offline machine can be crushed, burned and burried right after you generate your wallet and still be swiped years later.
Don't be fooled by your idea of knowing what there is to know about this subject.
Diversify your storage methods like you diversify your investments. You simply can't know the unknown, but you can manage the unknown.
-xalex
This is good advice.
Regarding the first point: there's simple random number generators very hard to backdoor called dice. Use them.