Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: Leapfrogger on October 22, 2012, 03:19 am
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So from reading the (extremely helpful!) posts about Bitcoin acquisition/laundering/etc., I get the impression that next to no one uses the Bitcoin client; everyone uses third-party online wallets instead.
Why is this? I rather like the peace of mind that comes with having my Bitcoins sitting in a file on my hard drive, having been received at an address that I generated myself on a Torified client.
Why get another party involved if you don't have to? Now, if the wallet service includes coin tumbling/mixing, I get it; you can't easily do that with the Bitcoin client. But if all you're doing is sending all your coins from one wallet to another, you could accomplish the same task by swapping out wallet.dat and generating new addresses. The "paper trail" would still be there, but you'd have just as much plausible deniability, if not more, since the addresses couldn't be linked to a "desperately random" selection of online wallets, all of which you'd have to trust not to take your coin and run or get themselves compromised by hackers.
Am I missing something here? Why bother with online wallets that don't offer "mixing?"
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I use the regular bitcoin client and it works great! I've checked out some of the online wallets and they have lots of features (like Blockchain's online wallet) so it's been tempting to use some of them but I'm happy with the regular client...it does everything I need it to do (like get my bitcoins to SR quickly!).
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I am with you, I figure it is just people being lazy and not really understanding bitcoins.
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In the past year, everyone was using MyBitcoin, an online wallet which seemed to be reliable (also SR used to suggest it).
It was suddenly hacked losing around half of the total BTC amount in it (luckily I had less than 1 BTC on it and I was able to retrieve what I had).
After that experience, there's no way I'm gonna use an online wallet again.