Bitcoin Forum

I voted "No"

I lost some when I reformatted and didn't have a backup. But back then they weren't worth much so I didn't care, now I'm kicking myself for doing so  :'(

As much as safe as printed banknotes.

If you lose banknotes, you don't lose all of them at once.

Well, you didn't really "lost" them.  You destroyed them on purpose, because you didn't value them much.

It may be not to late to recover it, though.  Check out "recover lost data" on Google.

In some other thread a guy formated his disk just as you did, and yet he managed to recover his wallet.

It was a long time ago, back when bitcoins were worth maybe .003 cents each  ;D

I probably don't even have the hard drive I was using before.

Don't write this.  Some people might be silly enough to think you're serious, and we'll have to explain them again.  ;)

Seriously, I admire you honesty but "safe" is always a relative term. I think currently it's safe enough to be useful, especially if the user is careful and knows how to do wallet file safekeeping.

To me better handling of the wallet file (e.g. automated encryption and online backups) is an area of improvement.

EDIT: sorry, got confused. the title of the thread is "is bitcoin safe" but the poll is "have you lost bitcoins", gotcha.

The "No, never" option should really say "Not yet".

Not yet! :D

corrected.

But normal users don't know how to encrypt and backup their wallet.dat!

If you lose your wallet, you lose all money that is inside it.
Same for Bitcoin, it's always clever to have multiple wallets.

Good plan or bad plan: Back up your wallet.dat on a USB thumb drive, hide this somewhere no one will look.

Yes. And it's easy to have multiple wallets for paper money, and it's cumbersome and error-prone to have multiple wallets for bitcoin.

I photocopy my FRN and keep them in multiple places. How could you be safe if they had to be in just one place?

Photocopy? O_o

You could tear your banknotes into 5 pieces and hide them separately. As long as you can recover at least 3 pieces you should be able to exchange them for fresh bills.

Not practical, as you have to backup the wallet after every transaction.

You could split the BTC across several wallets (probably a good idea), and have a "savings wallet" that you only occasionally transfer money to. Might be practical enough to hide that one on a USB drive.

Personally I find USB drives much too easy to lose.

No

Keypool, every 100 will do.

Who lost money to mybitcoin.com, and how much?

Joke vote?

It's quite possible that you forgot your password and thus the account become irretrievable.

You forgot to include "yes: I bought USD". :)

-MarkM- (All your USD is how much bitcoin)

I was curious how long the roundtrip was gonna be to send money to myself, but i forgot about the transaction fee setting, someone out there got 0.01BTC that i didn't meant to send.