By the time some body brute forces your Wallet. Your personally identifiable information has been obtained. Some of the most important websites in the world have been hacked and attacked. Pretty much the entire structure of Internet and every thing that sits under encryption is now extremely vulnerable to attacks. When you wake up realizing encryption is no more, things go down immediately on all sides.
I think you've got more problems if someone's brute forced your wallet, than your personal identifiable information. Also, what exactly do you mean by
personal identifiable information? A wallet shouldn't typically store any of this information. Unless, you're talking about exchange wallets, which technically could store KYC information. A traditional wallet like Electrum or Bitcoin Core doesn't store that though.
Also, it's probably worth noting that most users wallets shouldn't be brute forced. The only way that's happening is if you've personally got poor security practices, i.e a weak password. No one's brute forcing the encryption method used that's for sure.
On the other hand. While I do expect we are closer to an attack, think of it like feeling we are closer to the end of the world. We are getting closer to the end. But it may be millions of years from now.
Attack on encryption? We're many qubits away from quantum computers becoming a realistic threat to encryption, and that's based on the methods used today. It's very likely, we develop quantum resistant algorithms. I mean we've already started developing them, way before a significant threat has even been established.
There are no guarantees in crypto, mistakes or loss of assets are your own responsibility. this is real financial freedom.
However, it's definitely not for everyone. Digital money is the future, and I'm sure a lot of us would like banks to disappear completely. Although, that means we'll likely have people who aren't tech savvy or don't know a lot about security who are responsible for securing their assets, which makes me uneasy. So, I do think that there will always be a need for banks, for the people who don't mind trusting third parties, and ultimately trust them more than themselves to handle their funds. Which, is perfectly fine; I don't need everyone to conform to my views, I just need there to be an option to not trust third parties to handle my money.
I agree. I probably focused too much on 'security' while the title says 'safety'. Although I'm not sure whether OP chose this term intentionally or whether he uses them interchangeably (admittedly, like many people).
Still somewhat puzzled about the intention behind the question specifying 'less' safety. Less than what? Less safe than using banks? Less safe than 2015 Bitcoin?
From what I can gather; they don't really doubt the security of Bitcoin, but the fact that users might pick the
easier approach. Take this reply as an example:
i agree but partially. Feeling insecure or not has nothing to do with the amount in my opinion.
although chooseing 12 words from a 2048 wordlist is secure mathematically. but mentally, i feel like someone else can just simple choose the same 12 words. (don't argue about the last word being checksum, i am just saying)
They've admitted that Bitcoin is mathematically secure, at least in regards to generating seeds, but they do seem concerned about users choosing simple words. I don't quite understand it, since most software automatically generates the seeds for you, but I suppose if you wanted to manually generate a wallet you could potentially come up with your own seed list that's within the word list, and import it via that way. However, I don't really see the benefit in that, personally.
However, ignoring the seed generation. There's is a element of doubt I think for most users. I've had it, where I've doubted whether my security was sufficient, even though it's very likely well beyond the average, but you definitely do have those doubts. The more technically minded you are, the less you're likely to worry. Although, I can definitely understand why some users would be worried when they don't understand how everything works quite yet or have never had this amount of responsibility.
Then you have hardware wallets though, which largely take the responsibility off of you.
