Bitcoin Forum

Lets say I backup my bitcoins in a safe place.

However if someone restores a deleted copy of an unprotected wallet file and starts spending with that file.
It wont matter if I backed up my wallet.

So you not just only need to store the file, but also make sure its very wiped out from the harddrive.

Meaning that its very cumbersome to be very safe.

(Ofcourse this also applies to everything else)

But still, people have their money in banks which do have lots of protection.

If you trust banks you can hire them to keep your coins safe. The benefit of Bitcoin is that you don't have to, not that you cannot.

Most Operating Systems have inbuilt software to erase free space. The only thing people will need to do is learn to use it

i would like to see that on windose...
i only know of dd on linux, or encrypting your harddrive and when you don't need it anymore you burn the key.

Well, to establish Bitcoin as a mass currency you need a never-thought-about-this-security-feature...

I think there's an inbuilt tool but I'm not very familiar with Windows. I know ccleaner (http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner) works very well. For the super paranoid there is dban (http://www.dban.org/)


Don't forget Bitcoin is in beta state. All the bells and whistles will be implemented in time

eraser is open source.  it's GPLv3 licensed and the source is available via SVN on sourceforge.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/

An older open source program which also does this job is Blowfish Advanced CS:
http://www.lassekolb.info/bfacs.htm

In Windows you can turn on EFS and/or Bitlocker if your version supports these features. For most people it is probably an overkill to encrypt both at the file system and disk levels. Personally I think that Bitlocker is not practical to use if your hardware does not have TPM.

I'm sure there will be mail spams with virus can steal your wallet comming out soon.

So, what if that older wallet had bitcoins you already spent? What is stopping you from going back to the older wallet and spending them again?

Noob alert! the coins already been spended before. witch means that your coins are referenced in another transaction in the blockchain, so nobody will accept your invalid coins.

Yes, hi. I'm new.

I just ordered some video cards to do some bitcoin mining, so I'm researching.

Hm. The block chain. Something that will grow into a gigantic distributed database?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Block-chain_and_confirmations

If you have any suspicions about losing access to any copy of your wallet.dat, Immediately transfer all coins to a new wallet you've set up yourself. Much akin to cancelling your credit cards. You'll also have to make sure any sources of bitcoin income point to addresses from the new wallet (eg miners).

The bitcoin network is finished. The software using it, however, is barely capable and needs a whole lot more development time to be viable to the masses IMHO. I know you guys are out there and working on it though, so that's a great thing!