I get all that, but it is a bit like having a perfectly good safe at home and still carrying your gold to the bank because opening it is a bit cumbersome and fidgety.
Kinda defeats the purpose of having a decentralized cryptocurrency.
Storing all your gold at home is your super secure safe is also not very smart though.
I am actually surprised we do not see more robberies of this kind targeting Bitcoin billionaires.
The chance that a Bitcoin billionaire has their private key held in a way that easily be robbed is pretty low. Most will be using additional cryptographic security. e.g. Shamir's Secret Sharing.
Bitcoin's market cap is currently around $1T. Killing someone with $1B in bitcoins would only increase the value of the remaining coins by 0.1%. That seems horribly risky for a very small gain.
Thats only true if you assume 100% of coins are actually accessible. The true market cap of bitcoin is always going to be less than the number of coins that have been mined would imply, due to losses.
Shamir's Secret Sharing could also be a solution to this, with parts distributed to your heirs and the threshold being the number of parts you distribute to others, keeping an additional part for yourself.
>Crypto is hard and cumbersome to secure ( paper keys, hw Wallets)
are hardware/paper wallets hard/cumbersome to use? I suppose they're less intuitive locking up a metal bar, but they're not exactly hard to use. If anything they're easier to secure because you can store multiple redundant copies, whereas you can't with gold.
That's about the security of bank vaults, not Bitcoin. Fiat savings (or gold, diamonds, whatever) stored in the bank vault would be just as hard to steal.
Irrelevant because I cannot (a) give the content of the vault from memory to save my life or (b) enter the vault accompanied (so there's an opportunity to alert bank personnel that I am under duress).
Well "irrelevant" to the safety of the wallet at least, not of my squishy bits.
Sure. I can hand you a handful of USB sticks about 20 paper wallets maybe a hard disk or two...and tell you, here are my keys. Now what you do? Do you put down your gun and start verifying which one is with actual funds or, do you know what is a usb drive and what is a hw wallet? Are you gonna ask me for my password too. How do you know you actually stole something worthwhile? How do you know I am not going to be faster transferring the coins to different wallets?
If the criminal is sophisticated enough to target cryptocurrency holdings, they'll probably transfer the coins to their own wallets right there on the crime scene. Exchanges won't help either: they can simply force their victims to log in and withdraw the money.
This also happens with traditional banks where I live. People are kidnapped and taken to ATMs where their accounts are drained.
I'd sit there with you and transfer them through some tumblers. I'd have brought a laptop and set aside time, and will threaten you on your life if you slow down or refuse.
It only sounds hard if you assume I'd take an unreasoanbly incompetent approach. It's like "rape is impossible because a women with her skirt up runs faster than a man with his pants down".
To be fair, because it is so easy to hand over access to crypto wallets vs a bank account (your bank will reverse fraudulent transactions) it would actually be possible to hand the robber a bait wallet with a small fraction of your net worth but enough to keep the robber happy.
Kinda defeats the purpose of having a decentralized cryptocurrency.