Is Bitcoin's Biggest Threat Actually Human Error Rather Than Hackers?

[Supreme Donvic]

When people are talking about the biggest threat to Bitcoin they usually say it is hackers, exchange being attacked or government restrictions, but what if I tell you the biggest threat are actually the people that are using Bitcoin.
‎
‎hackers may steal Bitcoin by exploiting a vulnerability, but a lot of Bitcoin loss happens because of some simple mistakes that people make, for example, sending Bitcoin to the wrong address, losing seed phrase, falling for phishing scams, exposing private keys and signing a malicious transaction. this are the things that are causing many Bitcoin users to lose there Bitcoin.
‎
‎Bitcoin security is actually very strong but if you expose your private key or seed phrase, you will lose everything.
‎When it comes to Bitcoin your security depends on you.
‎
‎For me, human mistakes cause more Bitcoin losses than technical attacks.
‎
‎What do you guys think?


~Supreme

[JaanusRaim]

I think that we have not seen real human errors by now, because BTC has not went mainstream as a medium of everyday payments (in is mainly the store of value now). When you make (for example) one payment per month you are usually very careful doing it correctly but if you start making many payments per day the role of human errors increases a lot.

[Ambatman]

well most of this supposed technical error are as a result of humans errors.

biggest threat to Bitcoin they usually say it is hackers, exchange being attacked or government restrictions, but what if I tell you the biggest threat are actually the people that are using Bitcoin.

Not necessarily
A persons error only affects the person not the blockchain
So yeah Bitcoin threat are usually around the above and as well as the QC risk that's open in the future.

[Slow death]

When someone loses access to their Bitcoin, they harm themselves rather than Bitcoin itself meaning it doesn't affect the price at all. Since such a loss doesn't impact the price, I don't view it as a threat to Bitcoin. In contrast, when a hacker steals millions of dollars' worth of Bitcoin, the news harms thousands of people and can affect the price; to me, that constitutes a threat. Similarly, if a highly influential government decides to ban Bitcoin, the price will be affected; in that scenario, the government poses a threat to Bitcoin. Let me give you a recent example of what I mean. Until a few hours ago, the price of Bitcoin was $86,000, with a strong possibility of continuing to rise significantly, but then this news broke:

Bitcoin dipped below $81,000 and oil prices gained after reports that military confrontation between the US and Iran could return.

source: https://cointelegraph.com/markets/bitcoin-nears-3-week-low-as-oil-heads-higher-on-iran-strike-woes

This illustrates my point: governments, hackers, and the ultra wealthy who hold hundreds of bitcoins are the only ones who can threaten Bitcoin though, of course, that applies to the price. As for adoption, there will always be plenty of people interested in buying Bitcoin, and the technology itself cannot be threatened. Fears of renewed conflict between Iran and the US have caused panic, leading to heavy selling over the past several hours. It is things like this that threaten Bitcoin.

[eternalgloom]

Yes, core protocol is actually quite solid and reliable. And weakest link in this entire security chain is human being. I think that more BTC has been permanently lost due to forgotten seed, corrupted backup and sending fund to wrong addresses than was lost in Mt Gox incident or other exchange hack. In many major modern hack, hacker doesn't even need to breach system, manipulating people into approving malicious transaction gets their job done.

So chain doesn’t care if you click wrong link or lost your paper. Self custody forces personal responsibility and most of we aren't ready for it.

[Charles-Tim]

For me, human mistakes cause more Bitcoin losses than technical attacks.
‎

What research did you use to make this conclusion?

Although, many people were careless in the past because they did not know that their bitcoin will be worth huge amount of money. Example is if someone bought $20 BTC in the past and the person later know that his $20 is worth $100000 in 2021.

Things have changed now, people are now valuing their bitcoin. I believe human mistakes would have been reduce, although there will still be some people that will make mistakes.

Backup seed phrase in different locations is very important.

[Hypnotizer]

When people are talking about the biggest threat to Bitcoin they usually say it is hackers, exchange being attacked or government restrictions, but what if I tell you the biggest threat are actually the people that are using Bitcoin.

‎hackers may steal Bitcoin by exploiting a vulnerability, but a lot of Bitcoin loss happens because of some simple mistakes that people make, for example, sending Bitcoin to the wrong address, losing seed phrase, falling for phishing scams, exposing private keys and signing a malicious transaction. this are the things that are causing many Bitcoin users to lose there Bitcoin.
‎

Human mistakes is a threat to the users/people's own holdings rather than the entire network just as some posts above mine already clarified.

When a user loses his bitcoin because of carelessness, scams are poor backup, it is only a loss to him but when a hacker attacks an exchange or when the government ban bitcoin activities, it will affect many people hence the reason why they’re considered the big threats to Bitcoin.

‎Bitcoin security is actually very strong but if you expose your private key or seed phrase, you will lose everything.
‎When it comes to Bitcoin your security depends on you.

That’s what comes with Self-Custody, you have to take full responsibility for your coins because you have full control over them.

[ColdLava40]

‎What do you guys think?

In some sense this is true, but even when we try to play safe things can also go wrong.

There's no safest way in the crypto world, errors both from human or developers can create a space for losses to happen in real time. I don't need to give examples because we already know what happened with the cold card vulnerability.

I won't be surprised if some people still are not aware of their funds stolen up till now from the coldcard hack. They didn't make any mistakes, they kept their funds in a safe storage or an assumed safe storage but things still went wrong.

So to me it's a 50/50 thing. Anything can go wrong.

[uchegod-21]

You think the biggest threat to Bitcoin is when individuals lose their individual bitcoins and not when their is a big hack where lots of users lose their bitcoins all at once? If an individual loses his bitcoins, it is out of his own negligence or carelessness, the result is that only his bitcoins will be lost, no one else' bitcoin will be lost too.

Once there is a major hack that affects millions of users at thesame time, it will create panic and many people who have trusted bitcoin for years will lose confidence in it. It will truly affect how people see bitcoin.

Anything that threatens Bitcoin's security is a major threat.

[Cryptomultiplier]

I have to agree that more Bitcoin is lost to human errors, forgotten keys, psychological manipulation by hackers and scammers and less of high technical attacks that we know as hacks.

The thing is clear as day because Bitcoin is a currency of value which gives the owner independence, self soverignty, and total control in other words and that means no third party can have control over it if the owner doesn't let them or create loopholes knowingly or unknowingly, that makes them lose their coins forever. It's as simple as that.

[VivaMan]

I think it's a Yes for me.  Bitcoin users should be extremely cautious and careful to avoid mistake . And stay conscious in protecting your seed and private keys.

[lionheart78]

When it comes to personal loss, it is indeed the error that is the biggest threat than the hackers.   we have seen many situations on the internet where someone suffer huge loss because of an error.  An error can even cause a huge company to go bankrupt.  Ever heard of a huge company getting ruined because of a decisional error?

With Bitcoin, unseen code errors that cause glitches or bugs during updates can be devastating. It can cause huge losses to Bitcoin holders if not detected and exploited by hackers to drain the addresses holding Bitcoin or create unlimited Bitcoin.

So I agree that one of the biggest threats of Bitcoin is human error.

[I_Anime]

When people are talking about the biggest threat to Bitcoin they usually say it is hackers, exchange being attacked or government restrictions, but what if I tell you the biggest threat are actually the people that are using Bitcoin.
‎
‎hackers may steal Bitcoin by exploiting a vulnerability, but a lot of Bitcoin loss happens because of some simple mistakes that people make, for example, sending Bitcoin to the wrong address, losing seed phrase, falling for phishing scams, exposing private keys and signing a malicious transaction. this are the things that are causing many Bitcoin users to lose there Bitcoin.
‎
‎Bitcoin security is actually very strong but if you expose your private key or seed phrase, you will lose everything.
‎When it comes to Bitcoin your security depends on you.
‎
‎For me, human mistakes cause more Bitcoin losses than technical attacks.
‎
‎What do you guys think?


~Supreme

Having full custody to your asset is one of the best thing that comes with Bitcoin . But that custody comes with a lot of responsibilities. The safety of your assets now rest in your own hands,  you’re now your own bank. For the past years many have lost their bitcoin in a very silly way , won’t blame them only few folks that would have believed that bitcoin will come this far both in adoption and price growth .

But if we are talking of threats to Bitcoin , we have consensus bugs, mining attacks ,cryptographic weaknesses, censorship, excessive centralization, severe regulatory attacks . While threats to Bitcoin users are phishing , seed phrase-loss, private key theft ,scams , exchange failures and user mistakes . But know this Bitcoin is here to stay .

[Die_empty]

I have to agree that more Bitcoin is lost to human errors, forgotten keys, psychological manipulation by hackers and scammers and less of high technical attacks that we know as hacks.

The thing is clear as day because Bitcoin is a currency of value which gives the owner independence, self soverignty, and total control in other words and that means no third party can have control over it if the owner doesn't let them or create loopholes knowingly or unknowingly, that makes them lose their coins forever. It's as simple as that.

We would have to search if there is a report or research work that agrees with the assumption that human error is bigger threat than hackers. In my own view, human errors have caused many people to lose their crypto. This might also be true since some of the people who prefer to invest in Bitcoin ETFs want to avoid human errors that could lead to loss of money.

Most of these people care about profits and not other benefits that Bitcoin offers. They don't care about privacy or freedom from government and institutional control.

[PrivacyG]

I have a small hope that people will end up becoming more independent from things in the future, but my hope is heavily contradicted all the time by the same people moving closer and closer to things that can only make them more dependent on Third Parties.  From people wanting to rent Apple devices to people becoming addicted to 'AI' and most of them nowadays borrowing money from Banks, and so many other things, they do not really show signs that they are ready to think on their own but the exact opposite.

Human error is not really a threat to Bitcoin, unless that human error comes in the form of a really bad development mistake that sneaks through all eyes and ends up in a new release.  Although that would probably be fixed in less than a day and be just another 'Zero Day Attack', although it can do damage.  Human error is a threat to Bitcoiners instead, as you have to make sure you do not make mistakes that put your Bitcoin at risk.  There are enough resources out there to make sure that risk is managed and prevented however, so I attribute most of these human errors as simple negligence.  Unless the Bitcoin owner does not have much of an idea how to use technology, managing the risk of losing your Bitcoin to your own error is in my opinion very close to managing the risk of downloading an infected executable off the Internet.  You have to know mostly basic computer and Internet education and then it becomes easy to prevent.

[Dogedegen]

We do not have any data that proves your theory. We have data that shows many cases of hacking, and we can summarize these amounts to arrive at a quite big number. But when it comes to human errors most cases are small anecdotes, reported in different parts of the internet. They are mostly stories, we can't even confirm most of them so that data is very weak and unreliable. So we have both things, the amount that was stolen by hackers is much bigger than the self-reported human errors and these amounts are much more reliable than those reported by humans. Someone could tell a story how they made a mistake and lost 500 BTC, but why would we believe that without any proof? People make up things all the time.

Still, I think that in the long term it is possible that the human error outweighs the technical hacking. It does not have to be, we will see what happens. We could make some model projections to get better speculations about this, but it would still be speculation.

Human error is not really a threat to Bitcoin, unless that human error comes in the form of a really bad development mistake that sneaks through all eyes and ends up in a new release.

He is more focused only on this question, and not like a threat to the whole of Bitcoin even if you are right about what you have written there.

‎For me, human mistakes cause more Bitcoin losses than technical attacks.
‎
‎What do you guys think?

And he is incorrect about this, there is no place for subjective opinions on this. Data proves or disproves such a claim. We can make subjective statements or have opinions on what the data means or what the future will have, but for the current situation the answer to this question is quite clear.

[PX-Z]

Threat? Threat for what? Extinction? The topic makes a good point, but saying human error is bitcoin's biggest threat is a bit of an overstatement. Lost seed phrases, phishing, and malicious transactions, yes they are really a risk. But protocol vulnerabilities, software bugs, and centralized exchange failures/hacks can also lead to significant losses which is bigger thread since it holds lots of amount and users.

[HelliumZ]

The Bitcoin that hackers hack can re-circulate in the market, that is, it returns to the market as usable again on various exchanges or through wallets.
But the Bitcoin that users forget and lose forever never returns to the market, that is, it is forever locked in a specific place for its entire life. That is, you sent Bitcoin to the wrong address during a Bitcoin transaction, which can never be used by anyone, that is, the address will never be owned by anyone. Or if you lose your security seed phase forever, it is impossible to use that Bitcoin a second time. So the Bitcoin that we lose will be removed from the total supply, that is, the Bitcoin hacked by these Bitcoin hackers is more serious than the Bitcoin.

[retreat]

It's not like everyone is making mistakes with their Bitcoin. So I don't think there's any real threat in that regard. Even though there might be people who make mistakes and lose their Bitcoin, I think the numbers aren't significant to pose a serious threat to Bitcoin.

For me, the real threat to Bitcoin is how more institutions are massively accumulating Bitcoin and starting to create the perception that holding an ETF = holding Bitcoin and that self-custody is a bad idea.

[Natalim]

Well, I have to agree that the greatest threat to our bitcoin security is our own human error. And that's one thing that we can avoid only if we managed to be responsible holders of bitcoin. Literally, once you exposed your private keys, your coins are no longer yours.

But how about those threats that are beyond our control like Quantum computing, solar flare and internet blackout? They can be very dangerous to bitcoin and can lost our bitcoin in just a blink of an eye. Still, there are threats that whether we like it or not, some things are still bound to happen and we can experience the worst if ever.