Who needs the FDIC? People are certainly free to purchase insurance on their Bitcoin and more (better) options will certainly be available as time goes on. I doubt the FDIC would want to be bothered, simply because the FDIC is an agency whose mission is to protect the American dollar and the banking system.
The whole point of Bitcoin is to decentralize money. The problems that come up should probably be solved in a decentralized way. I don’t think anyone who understands Bitcoin would suggest that you should keep your money on a remote server run by someone else.
Bitcoin is still in speculatin’ territory, not for families.
The money i have for my family I keep in a bank.
That is protected.
With insurance.
Because I don’t want my family to pay for my mistakes.
If you’re keeping your family’s savings in Bitcoin you should immediately take it out and put paper bills under your mattress where it will be safer. Possibly bury it in your backyard.
I refuse to touch bitcoin or any of the other cryptocurrencies for idealogical reasons. I refuse to speculate on the stock exchanges for similar reasons. I also don’t have a family I am responsible for and as I am on long term disablility benefits I don’t have a huge amount of savings.
I just don’t get any pleasure at the loss of money which has unfortunately affected some families. I might if I hear that the Winklevoss twins have been reduced to living like the lower middle classes though.
I see, so your hypothetical concerns about families was just a strawman you created to say “what about the children” instead of just saying “Hey EggyToast, quit being smarmy, I’m sure someone was badly financially hurt by their poor decision.”
Unless you can name a family affected by this loss, please stop bringing up hypotheticals. Otherwise I get to talk about all the crimelords who are now bankrupt and can no longer use their financial clout to break the fingers of hardworking family men who took out a poorly thought out loan. These hardworking family men have now learned a very important lesson and can now continue to provide for their families thanks to this loss of Bitcoin, huzzah!
Ok so I cant prove that they were bankrupted or have families but these people were upset by losing a relatively small amount. That last one is questionable as the amount lost was more money than I have.
I’m too tired to keep on reading, and I left out the suicide story that may or may not be fake.
I’m going to leave here now as I probably agree with you regarding the people who lost hundreds of bitcoin. I don’t want to derail further.
I recently got curious about exchanges so I found one that actually operates from within my country (Canada). I also have a bank account with one of the five major banks here.
The exchange account has large passwords, two-factor authentication through email or SMS, the option of having all email communications be encrypted with PGP, and a log of activity like which IP addresses have logged into the account.
The bank has you enter a bank card number, shows you a phrase and image you picked previously (with a message not to enter your password if you don’t recognize the phrase and image), enter your 6-character password (which if you go in through telephone banking, converts to a 6-digit password). Then if it decides you haven’t logged in from that computer before, it asks you for the answer to a verification question like your mother’s maiden name.
The bank has more backing them, but which one seems to know more about security?
You might think the exchange, but - both may be making the security trade-offs that make most sense for them.
The bank has insurance; they can blame customers for some of what insurance doesn’t cover. If they get too technical with the security, they may (they reason) alienate non-technical customers and send them to other banks. So, the bank needs to minimize the money it loses - balancing the hacking losses it can’t pass off either on customers or insurers, against losses due to customers getting annoyed with all this SMS password rigamarole, and switching to a bank offering less cumbersome security measures.
I’m actually kind of surprised no one has screwed with them by locking out a ton of people. They lock you out of your account and make you call customer service if someone enters the wrong password a few times in a row. Someone could write a script to try random bank card numbers and just put in garbage passwords when they hit a valid one. Do that with a botnet and customer service would be overwhelmed.
I suspect you’re right about why they don’t bother with proper security. Banks in Canada are huge. They don’t need to care.
I suppose I am reacting to this like I react to people who get into financial trouble using pay day loans. Yes they are foolish for getting a loan from a legalized loan shark but people do get that desperate all the time. I have been that desperate before, although I never planned to get or got any loan.
I am blaming the system. Laughing at the people who lost out because they were victims of the system is not going to persuade them to fight against it. There is a huge difference between a billionaire who lost a few hundred BTC, and the working class person who was persuaded by a cryptocurrency advocate to invest and lost a few BTC.
Going by the amount of schadenfreude about this I expect that even fewer of the financially poor victims will be open to being told that the game is rigged against them, and the best thing to do is never play. I also know that a lot of people will never change. I still try despite this, just one person changing viewpoint to agree that fighting against this is a good idea is worth it, though obviously I would prefer a lot more.
