Bitcoin

puk999

bowlhead99 said:

puk999 said:

markj113 said:

A simple hardware wallet keeps digital currency 100% safe.

What then stops a malicious party with access to the seed phrase duplicating the holdings on a separate wallet and gaining the Bitcoins for themselves?

The seed phrase is supposed to be written down by the Bitcoin holder, yes? On indestructible material in case there's a fire, yes? How is the Bitcoin holder supposed to protect this seed phrase from being read by someone else given that it's in this form?

Unless I'm missing something, I can't see your 100% safe claim is valid. Please tell me what I'm missing.

It's feasible to remember the seed phrase without writing it down, much as people remember their multiple passwords. After all, what is a 'phrase' if not a set of 'words' in an order (the individual words can of course be complex).

[snip]

Good point. I had previously Googled "seed phrase" and found lots of stuff about stamping it onto metal (e.g. for fire safety), or writing it down, but nothing preventing memorisation or writing it down in an obscure fashion like you said.

bowlhead99 said:

puk999 said:

markj113 said:

A simple hardware wallet keeps digital currency 100% safe.

What then stops a malicious party with access to the seed phrase duplicating the holdings on a separate wallet and gaining the Bitcoins for themselves?

The seed phrase is supposed to be written down by the Bitcoin holder, yes? On indestructible material in case there's a fire, yes? How is the Bitcoin holder supposed to protect this seed phrase from being read by someone else given that it's in this form?

Unless I'm missing something, I can't see your 100% safe claim is valid. Please tell me what I'm missing.

[snip]

So, storing complex passwords is not a problem for most people, even moreso if they are obscure passwords that don't look like normal words in the first place. It is generally trickier if you do want certain other people to be able to acess an account or a bitcoin wallet in the case of your untimely demise, Sharing it with your nearest and dearest so that they can access it after you are gone - without writing detailed instructions that can't get lost or destroyed by fire, and without risk of anyone ever finding what you had written down to them and what they would need to know to make it work - can be more complex.

That would be something of a worry if nobody could inherit your Bitcoins and they were lost forever. Seems like a downside!

With financial institutions you get the protection of needing to authenticate yourself to access the account, plus some safeguards about setting up rogue payees. When you die your assets don't get locked out and will typically find its way to your beneficiaries.

P.S. Finding this new forum software much harder to use when replying. Sometimes I can't move the caret outside the block I'm quoting!

eskbanker

puk999 said:
P.S. Finding this new forum software much harder to use when replying. Sometimes I can't move the caret outside the block I'm quoting!

This irritating 'feature' (when prevented from appending text after a quoted block) is relatively easy to work around by using the facility to toggle in and out of HTML mode via the last button on the edit menu, i.e. </>.  No need for any HTML expertise, just toggle, type some text after the end of the block (a single character does the job) and toggle back again and edit as before, job done!

BigCoCo

bowlhead99 said:

It's feasible to remember the seed phrase without writing it down, much as people remember their multiple passwords. After all, what is a 'phrase' if not a set of 'words' in an order (the individual words can of course be complex). 

The thing with remembering is, People FORGET! People do remember multiple passwords, Pin etc. bu they often forget it too. Memorizing is not bullet proof.
Though I like the kind of technique you shared. 

BananaRepublic

EdGasketTheSecond said:

Seems like you have to be a bit of a geek to use a cryptocurrency safely. I mean it's no good for the older generation who pops into the local building society each week with a passbook is it? There have been many tales of fortunes being lost in bitcoin through scams, fraud, carelessness; much more so (as in a higher percentage of total crypto value) than with conventional investments imho.

Not a problem as it’s not intended to act as a real currency. I believe it simply could not act as a real day to day currency because it is so ridiculously complex to use from a computational point of view. In other words it is impractical. It is for speculators driven by greed. 

2unlimited91

bowlhead99 said:

If you don't want to write down the whole seed phrase for someone to find, you can just deliberately write it down incorrectly as you might do for any of the various passwords you need to record in life. For example, say you are going to make a 20 character password for some online account. You write down a 17 character password. Then at position 3, you insert the number 3. And at the new position 14 you insert the number 14. So you innocuously wrote down on a piece of paper "I could eat six pies!" but actually the password you're going to use for the website is ic3ouldeatsix14pIes! 

As you know that the mathematical constant 'pi' is about 3.14, and the phrase is reminding your about your love of pi, you don't find it tricky to do.  And also you knew that despite writing down the first instance of the 'I' as a capital letter because it looks more natural in the sentence, actually it's the last letter 'i' that is capitalised in your password, because ha, I never liked my English teacher. However, while someone finding the phrase written down on a piece of paper might think it is probably some sort of password string (because why the hell would anyone write down how many pies they could eat?), they may at best think that the 'six' part of it is supposed to be a number 6, or something like that. It takes a heck of a lot of social engineering to figure out how an individual's brain ticks.

I'm not saying this is a bad method, but an attacker who discovers piece of paper doesn't necessarily have to guess which variant of the phrase is your actual pass phrase. They may be able to feed the phrase to a program which tries a large number of variants on it, of the kinds of things you suggest (capitalizing different letters, inserting a few digits, removing spaces, etc). It may be that the number of variants they would need to try, although it is larger than a human could try manually, is not too large for a computer to "brute force" in an acceptably short time.

Aegis

I've reached the conclusion that cryptocurrency is basically an elegant solution that no-one needs to a series of problems that almost no-one has.  It's an interesting demonstration of technology, but if I was investing for that reason I'd want to buy the tech companies developing blockchain applications rather than the products they make. 

The analogy I've used before is that it's like thinking that Sony is onto a great product with the PS5 and you want to get in on that as an investment, so you decide to buy and hold 1000 PS5s (instead of the more obvious solution in this case of just buying Sony shares, but that's not available when the tech is being developed by anonymous individuals or private groups).  It might work really well for some early "adopters" as the stock is depleted and you sell into scarcity, but over time you either buy and sell at a small markup (i.e. you become a retailer) or you lose money by sitting on what increasingly becomes an obsolete product in a sea of competition.  Regardless, at no point was buying and holding 1000 PS5s a sound investment - it may turn out to be a good business plan in terms of retail success, but it is not a rational long-term buy and hold investment.

Ultimately it's just a pseudo-commodity, nothing more.  In my own investment portfolio, I hold zero crypto assets, and I don't recommend them for my clients.

EdGasketTheSecond

I struggle to see the value of crypto currencies. Aren't they just rare numbers? At the moment enthusiasts are assigning value to these numbers but that could evaporate overnight like the emporer's new clothes once people see through the hype.

It has been argued on this thread that the same can be said for gold. Maybe, but at least it is something tangible that you can look at and hold, is used for expensive jewelry, and has a history over thousands of years of being a store of value and tradeable .

Bravepants

RichTips said:

jaybeetoo said:

Sebo027 said:

I think it's interesting - a friend of mine was showing me that, yesterday, in a 24 hour period, there had been something like 42 billion dollars worth of transactions in the bitcoin ledger. And he subsequently showed me these photos, "miners" - big business!. Hardly hipsters mining from their bedroom in their parent's house. 

What a complete waste of Earth's natural resources.

What a complete waste of the Earth's natural resources.

What a complete waste of the Earth's natural resources.

What a complete waste of Earth's natural resources.
People should think like me and instead:

How on earth can you compare humanity's inate curiosity, scientific and engineering progress with Bitcoin? This is perhaps the most ridiculous post I have ever seen!

[Deleted User]

Bravepants I think you don't get it. Bitcoin *IS* the progress. It's an experimental, new monetary system. It uses much LESS energy than current banking system and infrastructure. Spending electricity to make sure that we have 100% transaction immutability, 100% resistance to censorship and fixed supply is *NOT* a waste of energy. Christmas lights are waste of energy.

Search "bitcoin vs banking electricity usage" and see for yourself.

BananaRepublic

Bravepants said:

RichTips said:

jaybeetoo said:

Sebo027 said:

I think it's interesting - a friend of mine was showing me that, yesterday, in a 24 hour period, there had been something like 42 billion dollars worth of transactions in the bitcoin ledger. And he subsequently showed me these photos, "miners" - big business!. Hardly hipsters mining from their bedroom in their parent's house. 

What a complete waste of Earth's natural resources.

What a complete waste of the Earth's natural resources.

What a complete waste of the Earth's natural resources.

What a complete waste of Earth's natural resources.
People should think like me and instead:

How on earth can you compare humanity's inate curiosity, scientific and engineering progress with Bitcoin? This is perhaps the most ridiculous post I have ever seen!

I totally agree. A car factory produces cars that provide incredible benefits to people. Whereas Bitcoin consumes massive amounts of energy in comparison to normal currencies and its primary motivation is greed.