Comment on General Bitcoin discussion thread (June 2011)

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 22:44:35 GMT

You didn't read the linked Wired article: $50 million was stolen from banks' customers by obtaining online-banking-account passwords by surreptitiously installing evesdropping software on the customers' computers. When the customer discovers the theft, the bank responds by saying that the customer is out of luck, and unless the customer can show that the bank did not follow the (regrettably insecure) standard procedures used in online banking, the courts side with the bank.

The reason I entered this thread in the first place was to point out that conventional online banking might not leave the average person less vulnerable to theft than dealing in bitcoins (even if in theory the difficulty of anonymity in the conventional online banking sector makes it easier to recover stolen money). At least the authors of the standard Bitcoin client had the good sense not to build on one of the most insecure parts of the software on a modern computer (the web browser) which is more than we can say for all the U.S. banks I know about.

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