The fact of the matter is you have to use rather inconvenient safeguards to ensure, w/ certainty, your coins are safe.
Just like you have to jump through hoops to make sure your cash (whether physical or digital) is safe. I've had my physical wallet stolen twice (once in my house by a plumber, even), and lost once, but I've never had my qt/Core wallet lost or stolen, and I've been using both almost as long, being fairly young. Just to get a bank account in the US, there's a long form to fill out, requiring all sorts of government info and in some cases, a fingerprint or a "vein print." Though SOME forms of cash is supposedly safe from theft in SOME cases, the hassle of recovery is, in a good few instances, more hassle than it's worth. US high schools (including where I went, in the middle of nowhere) actually have personal finance courses to teach teenagers how to use this complex system, from writing checks and securing cash to figuring out the pros and cons of different kinds of bank accounts and figuring out what the Hell TransUnion is. -But people need a bank account because it's what everyone else is using, and like switching from the imperial to metric system, it's a PitA current adults aren't interested in taking so long as the current system can continue limping along (though still a bad long-term plan to go with). -And I STILL don't understand fiat issuance fully (along with a few grads of university Quantitative courses). THAT's a complex system almost impossible to fully wrap your head around.
I'd argue what's really putting "normal" middle-aged people off to Bitcoin is just the worry about screwing something up and losing money because they just aren't very familiar with computer software in general and think this is some type of high-level sorcery only able to be understood by basement-dwelling neckbeards and MIT grads (... assuming a difference
) when it's as simple as copy-pasting one string of characters (or clicking a URI), double-checking it to make sure you/it copied the string right, then clicking the button to send it off (and hopefully, entering your password in).
I think it's really just fear of the unfamiliar, and I think that's compounded when we're really paranoid because we don't want them to lose any money on our advice, so we give them really over-the-top security measures we insist they take to keep $300 in BTC secure when they'd almost certainly never run into a security issue using a lite client without any significant changes to their general browsing/use habits. We -- and I'm using "we" really loosely here, because I mean to say "I" and assume most others are paranoid when someone comes to them for advice on what to do with their wealth -- tend to basically tell them the equivalent of keeping 2+ physical wallets for their cash, one they keep on-hand with a trivial amount in but for which they still tether to a hole cut into their body with a key they keep in another compartment of their body they had cut with a waterproof-bag which only opens with your fingerprint, and one which is kept inside mini-safes under a floorboard with a significant amount of cash (or even better, with some buried under floor boards, some kept buried in the backyard, and some stuffed into a tree) with keys kept in bank safeboxes, though you obviously don't want to keep all the keys in the same box or even the same bank -- you want to use different keys, and ideally, you'll use modular key parts, where there are maybe three key parts fit together, and you need any two keys to open one box, where these various key combinations are stored on a hidden, encrypted hard drive partition which uses a n-of-m password you've written down and given to various family members and well-trusted friends to decrypt. -And really, for a casual user with a "casual" amount of cash, the paranoid advice we give is just fucking stupid. Almost nobody keeps tens of thousands of dollars under their mattress, but it's almost like we assume everyone curious about Bitcoin's going to have 100BTC just sitting around on their Android BTC wallet, though maybe this is just from too many people in the past going full-retard and investing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into something they just accumulated a cursory understanding of thirty minutes ago because they have some intuitive sense that it's the next big thing because young people are using it. Those people really ought to be waiting until they can just have their EdwardJones agent, or whoever, buy BTC (or a representative fund) for them, and maybe we're just too enthusiastic about BTC to tell them to wait for an established corporation to professionally handle (and insure) their life savings.
