Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

not sure if all cryptocurrency have same kind of "protection" against this, but im mainly interested in Ethereum and Bitcoin now.

If 20 years old person wan to use BTC and ETH cryptocurrencies to store main part of his/her life savings for next 60 years, how big risk is there the developers of the cryptrocurrency will steal his money or cryptocurrency will "bankrupt" some way so his json wallet key file will become useless?

How the cryptocurrency can be damaged so people loose 60-100% of their money saved there?

I would like to evaluate risks saving money in cryptocurrency for the term of tens of years. Thank You

The currency can just be abandoned, and lose its value. other option is breaking the algorithms the currency uses, for example by quantum computers in the distant future, but it will most likely fork and use post-quantum cryptography in this case.

Very low. The developers of the reference implementation (i.e. consensus rules) cannot steal your Bitcoin without a hard fork. That hard fork would require that the miners agree to that change. If the developers did something malicious or suspicious, they would no longer be the developers of the reference implementation because the software labeled as the reference implementation would be changed.

It is entirely possible for a cryptocurrency to be abandoned and be "dead". This happens to a lot of altcoins but it is unlikely to happen to Bitcoin.

I think someone would be certifiable to park money in any crypto for tens of years. That goes for Bitcoin, Ethereum and even more so for everything else. No one knows how this is going to pan out.

It's easy to forget that this entire scene is only 7 years old. Who knows what the future holds? And as others have pointed out abandonment is probably the most obvious risk. People seem to have this idea that the whole world is using crypto and it's too big to fail. It's the total opposite. It's teensy and fragile.

I'm sure most people here have some money in the game. They're also watching developments like a hawk and would run away at any sign of faltering. I for one would not go anywhere near ETH with a long term mindset. There can't be more than a few tens of thousands of people involved and they seem worryingly cavalier about how it's operated compared to BTC.

By 51%-attack.
One moment miners would decide that doublespending blockchain can give them more profits in fiat currency than mining mainchain and earning 12.5 btc per block

Satoshi Nakamoto once said that he thinks in 20 years Bitcoin will have a huge daily transaction volume or none. The extremism in that quote only reflects the thoughts of a man who does not believe 100% in the viability of Bitcoin when it comes to the test of time. He is being very practical and true to us when he said that the whole experiment he started could also fail.

We are even starting to see Bitcoin's limitations right now. The core developers and contributors, as brilliant as they are, will only try to prolong the life of Bitcoin. But within 50 years it will be replaced by something better.

Imagine if you borrowed bitcoins to pay for a house. If the BTC goes up, you will have a harder time paying the mortgage - but on ther other hand, if the bitcoin collapses, you have a free house :)

Personally the risk is too big.

My advice would be for people not to use online services to store bitcoins for long term, because those services might abandon their projects and you would be left stuck in the cold. If you want to store bitcoins for the long term, you would have to use paper wallets. This way, you are not dependent on any service for the future of you money.

Bitcoin developers working on the Bitcoin protocol come and go, so there will always be someone willing to fill the gaps. They can make any changes they want, but it is still up to the majority of the users to decide, if they want to run that software <changes> or not.

A big failure could result from lots of things : Regulation / Large services being hacked / Mining centralization etc..

imagine u stored 500btc in ur walled , and all btc gone because of a keylogger

Hello, let me address your question:

WALLET RISK:
- Use Electrum and have your seed phrase written down stored in safe location or stored in other safe ways. Also keep a copy of the Electrum installer and the wallet file on multiple digital devices, in case the software will be abandoned or uppgraded later, so that you dont lose the software that holds your money. Private keys will be easy to extract later if the wallet format changes, just make sure the seed is ok and you have the software. (Presumably the software will work on the new operating systems as well, otherwise keep a copy of the operating system & an old PC that will make it work in 60 years)

THEFT RISK BY HACKER:

Well just keep your wallet and passwords safe, there are many guides here how to keep your wallet safe, just read them, i am not going to explain here because its very long & complex.


HARDFORK/OBSOLESCENCE/UPPGRADE RISK:

Hopefully bitcoin won't be hardforked because its disastruous, but we might get franky1 here to tell us otherwise.

Either way, make sure you are subscribed to the Bitcoin emergency feed:
https://bitcoin.org/en/rss/alerts.rss
And the Bitcoin update feed:
https://bitcoin.org/en/rss/releases.rss

Once in a while check them to make sure you are up to date with bitcoin, these are the more important news, for everything else just use the bitcoin newsletters or this forum or the /bitcoin subreddit.


MARKET RISK:

There is always a risk that BTC goes to 0$ for whatever reason, i think its very unlikely, but you should also be up to date with the bitcoin price.

https://blockchain.info/charts/market-price

Use this link to watch the price, It should be around for a long time,and you will be able to decide if you want to keep your BTC or buy more or sell.

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I think this should sum it up, of course there might be other risks too, but I just outlined here the basic ones.

If you prepare for these 4 risks, then it should be no problem storing your bitcoins for 30-60 years.

Then that person would be an idiot for not splitting up that amount of coins into much smaller amounts across dozens of cold storage methods.

Minimise the risk of losing coins or being hacked by splitting up your stash.

I believe that for a while cryptocurrency is stable. Even if is risky I'll better try than be the one that didn't anything to earn some more money.

The inherent advantages of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is such that those that have for instance tested the very low transaction fees viz-a-viz the fiat currencies are never giving up on them, even some states in the U.S. have discovered that so much cost would be saved by collecting revenue in bitcoin, so there's much more hope for the cryptocurrencies especially bitcoin.

The biggest risk I see is that POW relies on large amounts of transactions to generate transaction fees to support the miners.  Bitcoin has to majorly take off or die.

The current transaction fee for BTC is over $6 per transaction. Only supported by the large amount of inflation BTC currently has.

Today is a biggest risk technology itself and his massive improvement during the time. Blockchain and wider cryptocurrencies are only 7 years old. You see, how much internet has been changed after 2000, when it was about 7 years old. So I would suggest to wait at-least 10 years, when the blockchain field is more calm and settled, and then make a decision to where to put your life savings for 60+ years. Before that you can always play with smaller amounts. There is a bigger risk but as-well bigger changes to win a lot.

Also, have to remember that CC is a huge risk for banking system stability and fiat currency itself. So it's not hard to see if the governments and ECB try to regulate bitcoin at some point or make it even illegal.

Hacking is always a risk. Plus price reductions can happen. Life saving for 60 years is a very big thing, I will advise you to save 5-10 of your surplus cash. Keep monitoring it.

Either you have to be naive or a big time risk taker to invest everything in one basket,never ever do that, be sensible in what you do and never dream about becoming a millionaire over night,the risk reward factor is pretty high when you evaluate 10 years of investment,no one can accurately predict how bitcoin is going to be a few years from now,it might reach a time when 1 satoshi becomes $1 or vice versa of $1 for 1 BTC 

the first risk i think is hacking, we all saw this happen before
also these currencies can be abandoned, and lose its value but seems not now at least

Why is not? some alt was using the source code of bitcoin, but in your sentences, i just realized if the alt coin just like a shield for bitcoin not for directly.

Investments are not supposed to just be set and forget unless you have someone else checking your investments for you, you must keep track of your investments and how well or bad they are doing a minimum of once every three months and then reevaluate your strategy.

In one point storing crypto currencies or investing crypto currencies for the next 10 years will be very profitable, we can see the people that use crypto currencies is keep on growing and the price is also keep on growing, if everything works fine then you will gained profit in the future, however if something goes wrong, like the coin being banned or the security is not good then your coin can lost it's value, for me personally i don't dare to risk to invest for 10 years, but for shorter term like 5 years maybe i will

My answer is YES.

The irreversibility and anonymity of cryptocurrency make cryptocurrency also a danger currency, as you said, the hacker would take all the money of the old man leaving no trace, it's irreversible and anonymous so he would never get his money back. In this case I won't say cryptocurrency is the furture of the currency, it's part of the furture of the currency.

On the contrary, if someone stole your money from your bank account, you would probably get it back with help of the police, bank is centralized and it can be bankrupt, but that things are less likely to happen.

Cryptocurrency is a good payment/investment methond, but to me it's not a good tool to save money.

I would say it is risky. Yet, if you will check your balance once or twice a month, it would be great to prevent money lost.

I see no reason why OP can not store bitcoins as a life investment. Worst case scenario if he senses a major shift, he'll quickly convert his coins to fiat with a bitcoin debit card.

Yes cryptocurrency are very risky, not all crypto coins are risky but there are some coin with no developments.

For now, Bitcoin miners relies on block reward to generate their income. In the future, if the income gets too low, miners would call for developers to increase the block size, have users increase their fee or the price would increase.

If the cryptocurency has been killed by hackers and steals thousands of bitcoin, it will affected all the people who use cryptpcurrency. Because of that, the people conclude that the bitcoin is not safe. Therefore, if the bitcoin is lost you will also lost.

I don't see bitcoin going down this time. it may reach 1500USD in the near future. it may go down a bit but may not go below 400-600 again.
I think its safer to invest to it after all, it needs more than 30years before bitcoin is going to be replaced by a newer and better coin.

How about have a little balance and hold part in crypto and diversify to other assets as well. Gold, stocks etc. Its about balance.

Hackers is really a problem circulating the web right now and actually they are the threats of our cryptocurrencies. When they take down cryptocurrency a big problem will happen to us who uses bitcoin and those who invested a lot and also they have big balances of btc and all of that will be gone in one blink of an eye. So we need a strong security of out bitcoin admin sites and of different sites is a must to be keep secured each and every firewall securities they have.

I agree to this... Most of the online businesses are troubled with hackers. Although every hacker is not a bad person but there are many people who do things with bad intention.  :(

If you like to invest in Bitcoin just do it

I think bitcoin is no different than anything else in form of investment, lots of people lost lots of money with companys like enron or other fortune 500 companys
lots of people lost lots of money because they never invested in stocks

you dont even know if you live in 10 years so why worrying so much about that??

Possible nothing happens in 10 years and your Bitcoins make lots of profit but than when you try to cash them out you accidently send them to a wrong address that you had in your clipboard anything can happen nothing is for sure

go with your guts and throw all of that analytical bullshit out the window dude

Most of the online business are always the risk to be hack but I think not only online business but the other physical business are also always face the risk of losing money or someone can even take money from banks illegally, therefore we cannot quit our business from the fear of hacking our money by hackers.

Risk in trading in crypto currency exchange is very low. Once you know what is buy orders, sell orders, dump and pump, you will never lost your money. Also, be aware of dumpers, do not be affected by them. They will just scare you to do a panic selling.

Even now bitcoin's price is tentative it may become 10000USD or become 2USD its not in our hands its just like that stock market with cryptocurrencies its a gamble put money into it when its affordable to U and think about its future progress like events that may lead Bitcoin to increase even more.

Value of Bitcoin and Ethereum keeps on changing daily. It is impossible to predict the price of crypto currency after one year.
Bitcoin had rose above $1000 some years ago and it had also fell to around $250.
It can also happen the other way, if you purchased Bitcoins at the time when was with 250 dollars and it today, you will get almost three times your initial savings.

You can also lose almost all your money, if there's a hack.

So, it would be better to keep savings in Fiat.

If I were you, I would rather invest that money in crypto instead just storing it . There are many crypto based companies offering regular dividends if you invest in their company.

the only problem is hacking, even the government could do, just turn off the internet would allow this

I am quite sure metals are a better long-term store of value than fiat.
If you keep fiat long enough, its face value will eventually drop below its intrinsic value as wallpaper.

Storing your life savings is very risky but if everything goes well you can earn a huge profit from it . But like what everyone said its price is unpredictable it may be increasing for the past month but there is no guarantee that it will also be in the future . The risk is you can lose your savings which is an very important in our lives . Are you sure you want to gamble with a collateral like that? Invest in bitcoin but not to the extent that your life depends on it OP . Also  not sure about the protection youre talking about, There is no such thing in cryptocurrency, If the coin dump your money will also be