

Ask HN: Would you pay for a bitcoin insurance policy? - mrmagoo312

Lets say you could pay $xx&#x2F;month to have your bitcoins insurance, in case of theft or lost coins, or anything along those lines... would you do it?
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na85
Contemporary insurance schemes usually rely on the insurer having some means
(or some chance) of possibly recovering the sum, either by siccing their
lawyers on the thief/thief's bank or getting the police to step in.

With bitcoin there's really no viable way to do this as there's no easy way
for a sub-NSA-level actor to trace BTC transactions.

So I'm at a loss as to how such a system could be made to work.

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wikwocket
I don't think this is true for many types of insurance. In many cases,
insurance companies can "go after" a perpetrator, like in car accidents and
credit card fraud situations, but what about home insurance that covers
fire/flood/acts of God? What about life insurance or health insurance?

In these cases I am pretty sure the insurers make their living by shrewd
actuarial rate-setting that tries to make their "average" policy profitable,
and by having a large enough customer base that the "average" case is
statistically likely.

The way to make BTC insurance work would be similar: calculate the costs to
replace BTC, times the likelihood of needing to, and charge more than that.

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devonbarrett
What would stop someone sending them to another address which they own, and
then claiming they were stolen?

