264 sats \ 4 replies \ @kepford 11 Apr 2023 \ parent \ on: How do you foresee the layman keeping their bitcoin secure? bitcoin
Bitcoin banks would not have the same pitfalls. For one, the biggest pitfall of banks as they stand today is not the banks themselves but rather the banking system. The money printing Fed. For most people banks work just fine. That is until they don't. The real question is, why would someone trust a bad Bitcoin bank when there is open competition between banks. I imagine we will see many more FTX like situations in the future until people learn. I think you'd see competition create stronger banks. A bitcoin bank in the future could offer collaborative custody as several companies like Unchained Capital.
The bigger problem is the state and its control over money. We can argue about who is running who but the banks and the state have monopolies across the globe. The bitcoin network is one of the first real threats to this domination. The masses will go for what works and what is easy. I don't think the average person is going to have a hardware wallet but who knows. People like us are terrible at predicting the future and we do many things today that our ancestors could not have imagined.
I've been thinking about the day when Bank of America buys out a bunch of these bitcoin companies. When and if that happens we know we have won. The other alternative which I would rather see is BoA going out of business.
I agree with most of what you've said. However, existing collaborative custody solutions such as Unchained Capital have, what I would consider, two major drawbacks:
- If the customer posses 2 of the 3 keys (as is the case with Unchained Capital) then this does not protect against theft.
- If the customer does not possess enough of the keys to not have to depend on the "bank" to withdraw funds, then you have the very scary possibility of the "bank" losing the key they hold for you and now you've essentially lost all of your savings. Another possibility is that they hold the key they hold for you hostage for whatever reason (think canadian government and the bank accounts they froze during the trucker protest).
So that leads to my main question: What method can be implemented to provide someone with the benefits the fiat banks offer while still maintaining the benefits that Bitcoin offers?
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I think this sums it up.
The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.
~ Henry Louis Mencken
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There are many solutions to this but all of the ones I can think of have the trade off of less security and more trust. I don't think you can find an answer that doesn't involve the tradeoffs. What is different though is people will have an option they never had before.
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Fair enough.
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