Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
The 10,000 bitcoins that seven years ago famously paid for the delivery of two Papa John's pizzas would be worth more than $74 million today.
The exploding value of the cryptocurrency since its first real-world transaction in 2010 is one reason the U.S. Internal Revenue Service is pushing to see records on thousands of users of Coinbase Inc., one of the biggest U.S. online exchanges. The company's digital currency platform allows gains to be converted into old-fashioned dollars in transactions that the IRS alleges are going unreported.
Coinbase and industry trade groups are fighting back in court, claiming the government's concerns about tax fraud are unfounded and that its sweeping demand for information is a threat to privacy.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 12 2017, @06:41PM
While others are directly addressing the bicoin issue - I'll mention that offsite backups are essential sometimes. For most purposes, Google's Gdrive is an adequate backup for keys and stuff. I say "most purposes", but it most definitely is NOT good for anything that law enforcement might take an interest in. In your case, backing up your bitcoin data to a couple of USB drives, and secreting them somewhere may be a better solution. Or, if you trust "the cloud", but not Google, then buy some cloud space. The already mentioned idea of a safe deposit box is a good one for essential data, whether that data be in digital form, or on paper.
Data that is backed up in multiple locations is probably safe from destruction, or from being forgotten. But, the more locations you back it up to, the more exploits it may be subject to.
No matter how you look at it, you have to balance the risks.
If we were professional criminals (by "professional" I mean "successful") we would probably have some highly protected location, with several professional killers guarding our data. Unsuccessful criminals save their shit to Facefook, or their own smartphones.