Quote from: inBitweTrust on November 15, 2014, 05:36:32 PM

Contribute here or make your own thread encouraging better security practices:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=858604.0

P.s... I created a poll for you so you can gather inaccurate stats that have too small of a sample size and impossible to verify since you seem to be interested.

Nice! That's more what I'm talking about.

So how big is your sample size?
8bn people
3bn "economically active" (that's around 1:3)
(technically, everyone is econmically active, because they have to eat and <1bn grows their own food... probably meaning that, on average, every working person looks after 2 non-working people...)
3m bitcoin users (that's 1:1000 of the "economically active", or 1:3000)
300k bitcointalk users (1:10 of bitcoin users, 1:10000 of the economically active, or every bitcointalk user represents a small town of 30000 people, when viewed globally...)
300 replies to your poll (lets hypothesize... so thats 1:1000 of Bitcointalk users)

But... I think it's fair to say that only concerned citizens/security conscious/technically minded/seriously interested people are active here, and they are not representative of the average user....

(So how do we correct for that.... how many of an industry, are it's early adopters and/or luminaries? 1%? 10%? 20%?)

Still, if they're not representative of the average user, that would be nice, because that would mean that this *is* the place to discuss security best practice, and to discuss what metrics are vital statistics, and how to gather them...

...But then again, the world reknowned experts are all employed and well paid, in the formal sector, and will hardly take the time to hang out here and wage small-talk with some internet forumites... instead, they are probably studying the myriad of tactics that the publishing of the Bitcoin source code has crowd-sourced... drawn into the public eye. ...And keeping their notes to themselves, because why would they share their accumulated secrets and metrics on how to get rich, with the world?

There's also the little matter of theory vs practice. Everyone knows what the right thing is to do... but if it's too much hassle, they won't do it. So I might vote on the poll "Of course I'm using a cold wallet"... meanwhile back at the ranch, a huge chunk of my money is in an exchange...

What percentage of Bitcoin's value is held in exchanges, at any one time?

Perhaps, what I propose is exploring the potential metrics that could pave the way to an API that allows exchanges and Bitcoin players to share back information... and some sort of service that will share anonymized aggregated data, without sharing anything that could negatively impact the value of those players... eg. number of transactions/day, number of user accounts, number of unique users/day, total bitcoin transaction volume per day, total bitcoin transaction volume in hot wallets, in cold wallets, threshold- and delay, in seconds, for transacting with cold wallets, number of people responsible, number of standard security protocol layers, number of obscure security layers, time to implement worst case recovery plan, number of geographically separate locations critical data is stored, do each location employ unique, isolated security from the others? etc.

Has the Bitcoin foundation considered/planned for something of the sort? Is there something like this? Is there some sort of official Bitcoin certification programme?

Obviously what would make the most sense is having this all part of the blockchain, or only putting the minimum required, if any, in there, and inferring the rest... but before that is done, it needs to make sense, and offer real value in return...