Do you think Coinbase wallet is safe?

[NCM]

.

[troy112]

No, nothing is, in these days. Put most of your coins in offline wallet or paper wallet..

[PenAndPaper]

I wouldn't hold to many coins in any online wallet whatsoever even though coinbase looks quite professional.

[Light]

If you want to have small amounts to use for online transactions then online wallets are fine. But if I were you I wouldn't store more than 1 BTC online. You can just store the rest on your HDD or a paper wallet or in cold storage which is far safer.

[TheButterZone]

No private key out of your exclusive control can ever possibly be safe. Humans and their computers are not infallible.

[Stake]

They have highly-paid engineers with Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science & Economics from some of the most respected universities in the world.

They use cold storage.

They have $6M+ in investments.

[TheButterZone]

They are human.

NOT GODS.

[Stake]

They are human.

NOT GODS.

You are right.

But they do the best they can.

[z3r0]

The issue is not their technical ability but their business interest. Imagine if Coinbase started coinvalidation and marked some of your coins as "suspicious", maybe because they have been used on the Silk Road before you received them. The feds can easily pressure Coinbase do to something like that, but the feds cannot pressure open source software to take away control of your money.

Google, with 40,000 employees, many of them very experienced, has had a major crippling flaw in their account recovery setup that essentially allowed anyone to steal your account. That wasn't ages ago. That was 10 days ago.

You have the power to be your own bank. Why let someone else do it for you?

[Stake]

The issue is not their technical ability but their business interest. Imagine if Coinbase started coinvalidation and marked some of your coins as "suspicious", maybe because they have been used on the Silk Road before you received them. The feds can easily pressure Coinbase do to something like that, but the feds cannot pressure open source software to take away control of your money.

You have the power to be your own bank. Why let someone else do it for you?

Convenience.

Availability.

Ease of use.

Outlet to buy & sell.

Just a few reasons.

There are pros and cons to both sides.

[z3r0]

Availability. If coinbase gets DDOS'd or their service is down, you don't have access to your coins. You ALWAYS have less livability with a online wallet than local. ALWAYS. No exceptions.

Ease of use. I'm sorry but this is extremely subjective. Personally Electrum is the easiest to use wallet.

Outlet to buy & sell. That's completely different. We are talking about wallets. You can buy/sell (you should trade on a real exchange, by the way) without keeping coins in their wallet for long durations.

Just a few reasons. I can list you dozens of downsides, but I will not as it is clear you will not listen.

Satoshi designed bitcoin so YOU have control of your money, not a trusted financial provider. That is literally why he made bitcoin - read his whitepaper.

http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Online wallets are never the solution. You either agree, or learn it the hard way.

[deisik]

With all the news of different services being hacked it makes me wonder?

Personally, I don't think they are any less safe than an average online banking system out there, provided you are using two-step verification...

[z3r0]

Personally, I don't think they are any less safe than an average on-line banking system out there, provided you are using two-step verification...

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/breaking/19942994/australia-police-central-bank-websites-hacked/

http://slashdot.org/story/13/08/21/027243/three-banks-lose-millions-after-wire-transfer-switches-hacked

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240208933/More-than-half-top-bank-websites-hacked-study-shows

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jun/13/business/la-fi-mo-banks-allegedly-hacked-in-cyberheist-20130613

Believe me, banks getting hacked are a weekly occurrence, and I know many incidents with detail.

Banks can recover from hacks as they have the government and FDIC to bail out from. Coinbase does not.

Satoshi designed bitcoin so YOU have control of your money, not a trusted financial provider. That is literally why he made bitcoin - read his whitepaper.

http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Online wallets are never the solution. You either agree, or learn it the hard way.

[Stake]

Availability. If coinbase gets DDOS'd or their service is down, you don't have access to your coins. You ALWAYS have less livability with a online wallet than local. ALWAYS. No exceptions.

Ease of use. I'm sorry but this is extremely subjective. Personally Electrum is the easiest to use wallet.

Outlet to buy & sell. That's completely different. We are talking about wallets. You can buy/sell (you should trade on a real exchange, by the way) without keeping coins in their wallet for long durations.

Just a few reasons. I can list you dozens of downsides, but I will not as it is clear you will not listen.

Satoshi designed bitcoin so YOU have control of your money, not a trusted financial provider. That is literally why he made bitcoin - read his whitepaper.

http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Online wallets are never the solution. You either agree, or learn it the hard way.

If you're going to bring in DDoS, it's easier to DDoS a person to disable them from their funds as opposed to a myriad of servers.

You just listed another easy to use wallet.  I can't access my funds on electrum from my phone.

You need an outlet buy & sell if you want Bitcoin to become big.  The average joe won't know how to mine and hold their funds themselves.  Coinbase solves that problem allowing people to buy & sell along with transferring easily.

[z3r0]

If you're going to bring in DDoS, it's easier to DDoS a person to disable them from their funds as opposed to a myriad of servers.

You just listed another easy to use wallet.  I can't access my funds on electrum from my phone.

You need an outlet buy & sell if you want Bitcoin to become big.  The average joe won't know how to mine and hold their funds themselves.  Coinbase solves that problem allowing people to buy & sell along with transferring easily.

Honestly, you are an idiot. You're obviously defending online wallets as you run one. It is recognized practice to disclose that. Is it easier to DDoS 1 website, or DDoS 100,000 Bitcoin users? Is a hacker going to try and hack one website with millions, or hack a user with half a bitcoin?

Yes, you can use electrum on your phone. http://electrum.org/android.html

Buy and sell is irrelevant as we are talking about wallets, not trading. I use coinbase to purchase coins too, but I will never leave any coins there for more than a day.

The only person defending web wallets is someone who runs a similar web wallet. Think about this for a moment. Also, hire a pentester (this means paying a respected company in advance) before your wallet gets too tempting for me to exploit a security vulnerability in it.

[Stake]

If you're going to bring in DDoS, it's easier to DDoS a person to disable them from their funds as opposed to a myriad of servers.

You just listed another easy to use wallet.  I can't access my funds on electrum from my phone.

You need an outlet buy & sell if you want Bitcoin to become big.  The average joe won't know how to mine and hold their funds themselves.  Coinbase solves that problem allowing people to buy & sell along with transferring easily.

Honestly, you are an idiot. You're obviously defending online wallets as you run one. It is recognized practice to disclose that. Is it easier to DDoS 1 website, or DDoS 100,000 Bitcoin users? Is a hacker going to try and hack one website with millions, or hack a user with half a bitcoin?

Yes, you can use electrum on your phone. http://electrum.org/android.html

Buy and sell is irrelevant as we are talking about wallets, not trading. I use coinbase to purchase coins too, but I will never leave any coins there for more than a day.

You present valid arguments.

One huge difference is that Coinbase provides 2-Factor Authentication.

Bitcoin user is infected with malware -> Bitcoin funds stolen.

Bitcoin user is infected with malware -> 2-Factor saves user's Coinbase funds.

Please don't think I believe HTTP based wallets are safer, I'm just playing devil's advocate for people to know the differences and pros and cons.

Someone has to argue the more difficult side!

Edit

The objective of my wallet is to provide a bitcoin & litecoin integrated wallet.

We support Google Authenticator and we are an on-the-chain wallet.

[z3r0]

You present valid arguments.

One huge difference is that Coinbase provides 2-Factor Authentication.

Bitcoin user is infected with malware -> Bitcoin funds stolen.

Bitcoin user is infected with malware -> 2-Factor saves user's Coinbase funds.

Outdated. Two factor authentication is getting built into the Bitcoin protocol. In addition, there was a exploit for GOOGLE that let you bypass 2FA 10 days ago. Not just bypass 2FA, but let you access into anyone's account remotely.

Just think about it. Coming in from the field, unless you're a POI, nobody cares about your emails, nobody cares about your photos, nobody cares about your facebook. If you get hacked, it's not personal. But we DO care about your bitcoins, and honestly, I cannot thank you enough if you use an online wallet.

http://thegenesisblock.com/bitcoin-protocol-analysis-native-two-factor-authentication/

Also keep in mind that malware can bypass 2FA already (hint: I've written one that bypasses blockchain.info, would be happy to adapt it for coinbase too but from "market research" the big BTC is stored locally or bc.info). And blockchain.info (which is a hybrid wallet, IE offline wallet running in your browser) has a shit ton more security measures than coinbase.

To recap: it is impossible for online wallets to be safer than offline wallets simply because there is a bigger attack surface (web stack, employees, legal compliance, etc), and rational attackers always target the most lucrative target.

Online wallets don't magically have some bulletproof glass - they are running the a local wallet too, PLUS overhead (the online parts), PLUS employees, PLUS legal issues.

[fligen]

No online wallet is ever safe, period. You are aware that people have been hacking into routers and transparently redirecting paypal.com, banks, to their servers, and it won't take too long before they do the same for online wallets, right? SHODAN makes identifying targetable routers incredibly easy, and so is HTTPS (or just stripping https out).

[TheButterZone]

They are human.

NOT GODS.

You are right.

But they do the best they can.

"The best they can" is NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER MOTHERFUCKING EVER GOOD ENOUGH. You are playing Russian Roulette with a FULLY LOADED AND FULLY FUNCTIONAL GUN. THEY WILL BE HACKED, JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER ONLINE WALLET.

[Stake]

They are human.

NOT GODS.

You are right.

But they do the best they can.

"The best they can" is NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER MOTHERFUCKING EVER GOOD ENOUGH.

It's good enough for hundreds of thousands of people (458,000 source).