Your money is exactly as secure as your private keys, and if they are stolen there is basically no prospect of getting it back.

"Be your own bank" implies "be your own security division", which very few people are qualified to do.

If I leave cash on the street should I expect it to be safe? Is that a deep security issue?

You implied there were deep fundamental flaws in BTC security, but your response shows nothing of the sort. Your 'deep flaw' is 'you have to protect your private keys'. You are describing a UX flaw, and I would agree with that. Objectively, you have exposed no 'deep security issues'.

The deep security issues are that transactions are, by design, untraceable and irreversible.

That means that any security breach is catastrophic. Whereas the routine security breaches of credit and debit cards, and online banking systems, are not catastrophic.

Physical cash is of course not subject to instant theft from anywhere in the world - the theif has to be in the same place as the cash. Whereas it's basically not safe to use bitcoin on any computer connected to the internet - to do so is equivalent to leaving it in the street - rendering it hilariously unsuited to ecommerce.

Not to mention that the most convenient ways of actually getting money in and out of the bitcoin system, the exchanges, tend to have frequent security breaches and exit scams of their own.

(I should just point out that in this discussion generally the anti-bitcoin side uses 'bitcoin' to refer to 'the totality of systems needed to do normal useful things with bitcoin', while the pro-bitcoin side limits it to only the protocol and possibly the reference client implementation.)

> by design, untraceable

This is simply incorrect. I fail to understand why so many people believe bitcoin transactions are untraceable, we are talking about a public ledger.

I understand the gap between how supporters and non-supporters discuss bitcoin. It's just that if you give all your USD to a scammer, we don't say there is a fundamental flaw with the USD.

The ledger records bitcoin addresses, which are not readily traceable to a person unless that person deals directly with one of the exchanges which implement KYC/AML.

It's factually incorrect to say that transactions are untraceable. Every single transaction is logged on a public ledger. The only difficulty lies in establishing that a particular address belongs to a particular entity. KYC/AML does help in a large way in this regard.

However, even with this difficulty, it's still easier than tracing cash payments to a particular entity. If I pay someone in cash, under the table, good luck proving the cash was ever mine. I would wager the government would prefer criminals conduct their business in bitcoin.

If you don't like cryptocurrencies, thats fine, don't use them. I'm just asking that you do not misrepresent them with half truths in some fruitless attempt to show they are flawed when compared to cash.

If you chose to make them irreversible - multisignature transactions with mutually trusted arbitrators behaves pretty much just like credit cards.

I'm not sure what Bitcoin equivalent of "leaving cash on the street" you're inferring. It might be helpful if you elaborated on that.

Bitcoin's non-physical nature (as compared to paper and coin currencies), I think, makes it more of a metaphor to a bank account or debit/credit card than a currency. This likely is a UX flaw, as you state, but it's a pretty big flaw.

And credit cards, in most jurisdictions, have lots of protections against theft and fraud, as well as consumer protections like chargebacks and transactions are reversible, of course.

> "I'm not sure what Bitcoin equivalent of "leaving cash on the street" you're inferring. It might be helpful if you elaborated on that."

Bitcoins are a form of digital cash.

You store Bitcoins in a wallet. If you lose your Bitcoin wallet you lose your bitcoins. In a similar sense, if you lose your wallet containing notes/coins, you lose your notes/coins. The security risk is the same.

The security risk is not remotely the same because in order to do anything other that store your Bitcoins (e.g. spend, transfer), you have to expose your money online. My dollar bills are never out there on the internet, so my only risk of loss is physical loss or physical theft.

Because of this, it's better to compare Bitcoin to other forms of "digital/virtual representations of currency", like debit cards and credit cards. And that's where Bitcoin's mass-adoption-type use-cases tend to fall apart.

You have the option to use a physical bitcoin wallet, you don't need to have your bitcoins constantly exposed to hackers over the internet.

But the digital form of bitcoin change things. A good hacker might check for thousands of computer a day to find private keys but he can't walk along kilometers to find coins on the ground.

Don't expose them to hackers then, keep your bitcoin wallet away from the Internet until you want to use it.

> If I leave cash on the street should I expect it to be safe? Is that a deep security issue?

Exactly. This is why, where there are trusted and easy to access alternatives, people generally don't possess and carry around large amounts of cash.

No, it's deeply flawed. Witness all the exchanges that absconded with their users' funds.

The previous commenter asserted that there are deep security flaws within bitcoin itself. There are not. An exchange disappearing with user's BTC is not reflective of flaws within bitcoin. Users deposited fiat as well as BTC. When said exchanges vanished, they ran off with the fiat as well. By your broken reasoning the USD has the same fundamental flaw as BTC.