Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

This has very little to do with currency regulation, more with banking and security. It's like some guy opening a bank in an old garage with thin plaster walls, simple pin tumbler locks on the doors and regular metal closet as storage for money. One has to be really careless to put one's savings into such bank, and only reason I can imagine why people did that because it was not apparent to them.

Building secure publicly accessible website that can store bitcoins is very hard. Almost all common software has multiple vulnerabilities, and the fact that stealing bitcoins once system is compromised is trivial, and, as I understand, irreversible (unlike breaking into bank website, for example, but like breaking into bank vault with cash) - this makes such task super-hard. I would be very suspicious about any professional that is not properly intimidated by such task. I'm not saying it's not doable at all - probably can be done, but if somebody claimed he did it I'd ask for a lot of proof before I give him my money.




One of the things that makes a public website that deals with bitcoins secure is that it SHOULDN'T store them, or at least not an amount worth stealing.

Bitcoinica lost a huge amount of coins in March (more than this time) because they stored their wallet online, you shouldn't do this, use cold storage.

OK, Bitcionica do use cold storage, just that their hot wallet was pretty bloody big.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: