What concerns me is the Jorge brings problems, not solutions even when some of these solutions are fairly obvious or already known and only require a little imagination and deduction.
The discussion started because someone (@aminorex?) claimed flatly that bitcoins are much safer than traditiional payment methods. That statement is at least unwarranted, because (1) there are many ways to steal bitcoins, (2) stealing bitcoins is easier, "safer", and more effective in many ways than stealing credit cards or bank keys, and (3) bitcoin theft is still a common occurrence in bitcoin businesses, which are supposedly run by computer-savy people.
There are also many ways to steal credit card numbers, at least as many as ways as to steal bitcoins and as he stated, consider that for credit card payments you are handing over the actual information required to make a transfer. A bitcoin private key can, with a little effort, be pretty close to 100% secure. This can never be the case with a credit card (though chip and pin will help somewhat). The main thing the credit card has going for it is reversibility which typically ends up in the merchant eating the cost of the fraud. It is not magically undone. Yes, there is some risk in this for the thief but it doesn't seem to have put many of them off.
AFAIK, each year about 7 trillion dollars are paid with credit cards worldwide, of which 20 billion dollars (~0.3%) are fraudulent.
What about bitcoins? I have no idea how much is the total use of bitcoin in commerce (excluding speculation, internal shuffling, and large finance), but last year Bitpay said they paid 100 million dollars, so let's say 300 million total. The MtGOX heist alone was at least 300 million dollars. Even spread over 2 years, it alone would be 30% of all commercial use. So, I think it is pretty fair to say that bitcoin theft is a much bigger problem than credit card theft, relative to total commerce.
Yes, MTGox was a cluster but it's important to remember that those bitcoins were not stolen from a lot of people but from Gox directly who were guilty of mismanagement (if not the theft itself). Details are yet to fully come out about that but it is clear that Gox was implementing many bad practices. They just happened to be in control of a large quantity of bitcoins. So in absolute terms, not great, in relative terms high but in terms of actual events, probably pretty low. Those not involved with Gox were not affected (other than price fluctuations on the news)
Yes, many of those problems could be fixed in theory; but in practice many still haven''t been fixed, and others (like the irrevocability of thefts and the near impossibility of identifying the thief) do not seem to have a solution even in theory. Others, like address phishing (tricking people to send bitcoins to the wrong address) may be done in so many ways that it seems unlikely they will have a single, simple solution. The problem is made worse by exaggerated claims of security, since they may induce users to lower their guard. (E.g., see that site that generated vanity addresses.)
And anyway, why should I find the solutions? I am the skeptic here...
I didn't say you had to find the solutions but you should at least be able to explain why such things cannot be ultimately resolved. That you don't seems to show that you are less interested in discourse and more about just regurgitating the same few points. People have rebutted the points you are attempting to make but you make no attempt to address those rebuttals in your later posts. It's just deja vu all over again.
By the way, the MtGOX heist must have been the largest single digital theft of all time, not just of bitcoin. Is that true? I cannot even imagine how a hacker could steal 300 million old-fashioned dollars from a company, and walk away with it.
I don't know. Was it a single theft? Have you heard more about it than the rest of us? It seems to me that there's a lot of information still to come out and Karpeles is a compulsive serial liar.
Poll
