It's no better or worse than a wired connection.

You connection to whichever website you're visiting is due to HTTPS/SSL, not because you have a wire plugged into your computer. That's what public key cryptography is about, being able to exchange information along channels that other people can watch. If someone can break your security by watching your wifi connection, then public key cryptography is flawed. But, to the best of our knowledge, that's not the case yet.

Besides which, lets say you're connected to a site that's not secure. Supposing you live anywhere but a city with thousands of people around, do you think the greater risk to your security is going to be the kid who happens to be within snooping range of your wifi, or the dedicated hackers that are picking up the traffic flows to the insecure website you and hundreds or thousands of other people are visiting?

I've used wifi almost exclusively for 10 or maybe even 15 years now. I've traded stocks, bought mutual funds, filed taxes, bought and sold bitcoin litecoin prime coin, done all my online banking, though it, etc... From my house, from the coffeeshop, from the airport. Not a single penny has gone missing. What I do do is make sure that i'm connected to each site securely (look for the padlock... when in serious doubt, and this might be more of a stretch for some people, I've even SSH'ed to a free shell account just to double-check a keys fingerprint (usually at airports, honestly).

What the greater issue is, is how do you connect to things like your email? If you're connecting via port 110 (POP) or 143 (IMAP), your credentials, your emails themselves, everything, are being transmitted across the internet, through who knows how many routers that may or may not be up to date, all in clear text. And being that email access is how services authenticate us, that's the BIGGEST risk, right there, I think.

Sorry... I just think that the whole "don't use wifi, its not secure" thing is way overplayed...

If cold storage is vulnerable, then it would stand to reason that every wallet is vulnerable?

But my reading of the coinbase article leads me to believe that the attacker would need to have installed a compromised version of Bitcoin on the airgapped machine? Or else the upstream version of Bitcoin would need to be compromised? Or Armory, Electrum, etc, whichever wallet software the user is using. Am I wrong?

So, yes, if malicious actors gain commit privileges on the Bitcoin source, then offline wallets are compromisable, as are every other wallet. And if a malicious actor gains access to your airgapped machine in order to replace your binaries, you're also vulnerable. That's my interpretation. Doesn't seem like it's too much a worry, honestly. I mean, if an attacker gains such access, then it's game over regardless of which method of attack they use.

Or am I missing something?

I don't think you should re-arrange your entire life because of a one-off incident. That said, how open is your information sharing? Do you share everything with the world?

My Facebook is friends only unless I explicitly choose to let more people see it... That seems like it should be the default, why should anyone want the world to see all of their updates? Social networking is about connecting with friends, not sharing life with the 99.999999999% of the worlds population that we'll never meet. Or at least, that's my theory.

Why not just try and see for yourself whether it resync's or just repairs  the sections that are corrupted?

It's a multi-pronged approach, as you don't actually know the method the thief has been using to access your account; first, obviously change your blockchain.info password. Probably not the route of attack, since they seem to strike as soon as there are coins availabke ti be stolen, but it can't hurt.

Next, create a new wallet and new addresses. There's the potential that someone else is in possession of your wallets private key, meaning that whenever coins are sent to that address, they are in control of them. Consider using Bitcoin the way that Satoshi envisioned, with each address only being used for a single transaction, rather than storing all of your coins in a single address.

Next, clean up your PC, virus scans, malware scans, etc.

If you're storing significant amounts on the blockchain, then you may want to consider a dedicated Linux or BSD machine tp use ONILY when transacting in Bitcoin... May not be worth the expense and headache if your losses are only $50 or $100, but if your losses are more than that, or if you anticipate wanting to store more and more via bitcoin, then owning a secure means of accessing them should be a given.

Thats my two satoshi's, at least.

If FC can't figure out how to obtain a VPN connection, that really doesn't bode well for AM shareholders

/s

So they retained 60PH of hardware rather than resell it? Why in the world for? Whenever they have a product for sale, buyers line up to pay them more in BTC than than the hardware would ever hope to generate. Sure, it feels good to AM shareholders who can say "our hash rate is X and we'll earn Y BTC over the next 9 moths", which is nice, but had FC put those units up for sale, he could have earned Y * 1.1 BTC for his shareholders as soon as the hardware was sold out, rather than by the time it reaches the end of its useful life.

i should probably shut up... I haven't owned AM shares since BTCT.co shutdown...

sorry on the delay.

If you're complaining about stocks and high P/E's, i'd only say you're not looking close enough. You must be looking at ETFs or the broad ranged market. Id suggest looking at value plays or value oriented funds... Lets say SFL as an example. Not glamorous. Certainly not techy. Buy at a 16 P/E, and more importantly an almost 10% dividend yield (with rising dividends since the crash). That's not too shabby. Plenty of others, too, you just have to dig!

Knowing all that, and this is just random advice from an internet person not to be construed as anything legal, I would think you could do with a much lower allocation to bonds across the board; High yield bonds are a lot more correlated to the stock market than interest rates, so I'd vote you spread those funds across your equities. The others, high rated government and corporates, personally, I'd dump, with some money going into a mix of equitities but the majority going to cash as "dry powder"; long term bonds have shown amazing returns from the early 80's til now, but that has been because of the decline in interest rates from mid to high teens to low single digits; its mathematically impossible for them to continue with those results; long term rates might lurch a little lower, but not much. I'd rather have those monies in a rainy day fund waiting for a dip in the equities market; last stop, emerging markets bonds - unless you're a pro, I'd dump those. You've got interest rate risk, foreign exchange risk, and default risk (emerging markets are notorious for that). If you want exposure to emerging markets, I'd assume go to emerging equities.

At the end of the day, I'd be more inclined to aim for

Equities:  65%
Fixed:      10%
Bit:         10%
Gold        5%
Cash:      10%

You're YOUNG; you can afford to be more aggressive, though ideally you'd get some income rolling in to add to your portfolio regularly...

thats my few satoshis, anyhow...

Nothing. As with bitcoin, unless the destruction is done in a verifiable way (i.e., sent to a burn address for the former, literally set on fire on video in the second), no one should ever take anyones word that something of value has been destroyed, or at least not adjust the value of the remaining assets.

How does one tell, for instance, that the coins stored at a given address have had their private keys lost, or that the owner is just sitting on them?

And how does one tell that the $100 you said you burned, you did in fact burn?

Even if you did burn your $100 in a completely verifiable way, the Treasury could ID the bill thanks to the serial number, and either reissue the note you destroyed or issue a new one in its place.

Bitcoin isn't even mentioned in their release.

How old are you?  What's appropriate for a 25 year old is very different than what's appropriate for a 55 year old...

Rough dollar amount involved?

Rough salary?

Any debts, credit cards, mortgage, etc?

And does Europe have anything akin to social security, guaranteed retirement benefit?

So, in essence, one would be hoping that the wouldn't lose their private key in 30 or 40 years? That's beside the speculation as to whether or not bitcoin itself will still be around in the future? I know we all want it to be, but storing huge sums with no way to yank it out if something negative occurs, neither of those seem like especially wise decisions...

Are there such things as time locked transactions with a single key?  Do they send the transaction with a date in the future? What happens if you lose the key the coins are destined for before you reach retirement age?

Get a job.

Don't care if you're not skilled enough o get a good paying job, you need to get any old job til you can get a better one...

It bears mentioning that cloud mining, like mining hardware, is usually priced far higher than the total amount of bitcoins that could reasonably be expected to be generated from the venture.

That's not saying there's no money to be made - indeed, for the big players there are mountains of cash to be grabbed. But for retail buyers, who are purchasing miners for far more than their cost of components or cloud contracts for the same, it's not really a winning proposition anymore.

Why should it be?

Say ABC Cloud Mining has a data center and equipment running in it that can generate 25 BTC per day, why would they rent it out for anything less than that?

I know it's been said before, but the OP of this thread may not have seen it, so Im saying it again...

How exactly does one "remove" bitcoin's "association" with the US Dollar??

Bitcoin isn't "pegged" to the U.S. dollar, it's value floats freely against the dollar just as any other currency or investment does.

Nor does it have any association with the dollar. But users who want to buy BTC or sell it either need to go through things like local bitcoins or else transact with a company that is "associated" with both dollars and bitcoins. There's no way to just snap your fingers and make it so that people can no longer ascribe a dollar value to a bitcoin.

Companies dealing with Bitcoin, in the US at least, are going to be heavily regulated entities, just like companies that handle cash, stocks and other investments. You might grumble about it, but there's no choice. Better that bitpay gets proactive and hires someone who can think through each of their decisions from th3 angle of "will this get us in trouble with regulators? Why or why not?", than try to do so through guesswork alone.

I don't see this as a bad thing, more of a pragmatic action

Unless shaman has seen huge upgrades, that's not how it works. It works by batching up a sequence of audio to another sample, not by converting what you're listening to into a sequence of notes and searching music databases for identical sequences.