if you have 100 btc in an offline wallet, you will still have it tomorrow, despite whatever bugs/attacks hit the exchanges.
imagine if your bank was hacked, many people would literally be removed of their money.
With cryptocoins, you have the advantages of keeping dollars under your mattress while still bring able to spend them anywhere that accepts them.
There is no problem with value changing tomorrow as this is a potential problem with any new payment methodologies. Adoption does not appear magically overnight. The US Dollar is velocity stable due to its wide spread use and being propped up by the equivalent of a bunch of duct tape and bailing wire.
There was a guy on reddit who had all of his DOGE and BTC lifted right off his computer. He was using strong, auto-generated passwords stored in a password manager, so he was not even typing in passwords that a keylogger could intercept. Presumably the attacker had a backdoor into his system, watched him work, and just transferred out the funds when he wasn't at his desk. Poof - all gone, with more or less proper security measures in place and no clear sign of an intruder other than the missing money. Several other people reported similar events in that thread.
These are still major problems for mass adoption of crypto, completely setting aside the massive cases of fraudulent pools, online wallets, exchanges, etc., etc. There are many subtle problems that are difficult to diagnose and cure that come with a technological solution like bitcoin, that paper money simply does not have.
When he died, my grand-aunt, who always thought he was being silly, went out in the woods and retrieved all the jars.
The cash had rotted and deteriorated to the point that it was unspendable.
However, she was able to work with the US Treasury to sort through the remains and identify the bills and replace them with new currency.
There's not really a bitcoin lesson here, just some family lore that seemed relevant. :-)
In both cases, there is one physical good which, when stolen, deprives you off the money. With cash, it's the physical notes. With Bitcoin, it's the private keys in the wallet (or private key to unlock the wallet's private keys). Making backups of the keys can protect against accidental data loss, but not against theft, as it increases attack surface (i.e. number of locations where the same money can be stolen from).
There is still an advantage here favoring Bitcoin, though: if the key is stolen and you know this, you still have a chance to preserve the wallet's holdings: just generate new keys (addresses) and broadcast a transaction of all the wallet's money to those addresses. If you can get the message to the network's nodes faster than the attacker, the money will be "signed away" before they can use it, and such attempts will be rejected as double-spends.
There is no corresponding feature for physical cash.
While you could construct a procedure to spend cash remotely without one powerful intermediate, this property is just built into to *coins, and it is simply how they work.
Are you sure about that? For the most part those transactions would simply be reversed. Bitcoin exchanges seem a lot more exposed to computer security breaches to me.
> With cryptocoins, you have the advantages of keeping dollars under your mattress while still bring able to spend them anywhere that accepts them.
Paper currency is a bearer instrument. It can be used for offline payments. Cryptocoin can't be. Both parties need to be connected to the rest of the coin network so the transfer can confirmed by other nodes.
Not to say that cryptocoins have no under-the-matress advantages. They are a lot easier to hide than cash and you can make backup copies of them, which obviously can't be done with cash.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature
The purpose of the blockchain is to establish an ordered sequence of transactions.
I guess it would be possible.
