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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday February 26 2020, @07:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the up-in-smoke dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

"In early 2017, he had just over 6,000 Bitcoin in one account, but he feared it may be too easy for a hacker to access," the Irish Times noted this month. "He decided to spread his wealth across 12 new accounts and transferred exactly 500 Bitcoin, worth almost €4.5m, into each of them."

The keys to those accounts were written on a piece of paper and stashed with Collins' fishing rod for safekeeping.

But later that year, Collins was cuffed and jailed for five years for drug possession, as dealers are prone to do. Believing his tenant was no longer able to make rent, Collins' landlord emptied his house and threw out, among other things, the pot peddler's fishing gear.

As it turns out, within the aluminum case of the weed-slinger's fishing rod was the sheet of A4 paper on which the digital keys to 12 Bitcoin wallets was scribbled. The paper was, among Collins' other belongings, sent to a dump in Galway and, it is believed, ultimately incinerated at a facility in either Germany or China.


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  • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday February 27 2020, @02:04AM (6 children)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday February 27 2020, @02:04AM (#963279) Journal
    Sometimes you have no choice. Here there's a central registry of births, and you can get ONE birth certificate, the original. No such thing as an authentic copy, a certified copy, etc. If the original gets lost, you have to have it revoked (you are given a revocation code which you store separately if you have any brains). Once revoked, you can order a new one, with new serial number and revocation code. Anyone can verify the cert is current with the persons information and certificate serial number. Copies are not proof, only that original.

    Given there's only one original, you can't store backup copies - they're useless.

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  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday February 27 2020, @07:03PM (5 children)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Thursday February 27 2020, @07:03PM (#963657) Journal

    Sometimes you have no choice.

    Sure. But with passwords, which are the subject at hand here, we do have a choice:

    • The safe and sane one: keep copies
    • The unsafe and unnecessary one: don't keep copies

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    • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday February 28 2020, @02:37AM (4 children)

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Friday February 28 2020, @02:37AM (#963915) Journal

      Both have risks. It boils down to two options.

      1. keep all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket like a hawk. The downside is that if it's gone, it's gone and nobody, including you, can gain access to your shit (which is better in many cases than someone else gaining access);

      2. Make multiple copies, knowing that every copy increases the risk that someone else gets access to your shit and changes the password, so you end up with nothing and they end up with everything.

      In most cases, you're better off under scenario 1. In both scenarios, you lose your crap, but at least in #1 nobody else gets to profit from your loss, maybe find interesting stuff on your hard drive that can blackmail you, steal your identity and take ALL your stuff, etc.

      Scenario: you lose your phone or laptop. Ideally nobody else can access it, and all you've lost is your phone.

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      • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday February 28 2020, @02:25PM (3 children)

        by fyngyrz (6567) on Friday February 28 2020, @02:25PM (#964105) Journal

        Both have risks.

        Yes. But those two options are not even remotely equivalent — not if you're smart. Multiple copies of passwords can be stashed so they are encrypted, anonymous, and incredibly difficult to find or accidentally run into, and these three things are trivially easy to accomplish.

        Again, it comes down to using your head. Also, again, phones, money, passwords — these things are not equivalent. Phones can just be phones, they don't have to be troves of data (that's a choice.) You can have multiple phones. Lose one, so what. Use another. Disable the lost one and move the number to the next phone. Done. If you managed your risk poorly, that's on you. We know how they work. Money is one copy only and any specific unit portion can only be secured in one way. Passwords are multiple copy and can be extremely well secured in all instances.

        Sure, you can do things poorly, and if you do, your risks increase enormously. But why would you?

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        • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday February 28 2020, @05:05PM (2 children)

          by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Friday February 28 2020, @05:05PM (#964171) Journal

          So you store multiple encrypted copies of your passwords all over the place - and forget the encryption key. How are you any better off? Using a password manager? You still need to either remember the key, or if it's a hardware key, hope nobody else gets their hands on it. Screwed either way, but the latter is worse, because again anyone can take your crap, change your passwords, and steal your identity.

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          • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday February 28 2020, @07:35PM (1 child)

            by fyngyrz (6567) on Friday February 28 2020, @07:35PM (#964290) Journal

            No. Same thing applies to keys as it does to records. Really, your argument has already foundered, capsized and sunk on this one. All I can see now are bubbles. 😊

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            • (Score: 2, Disagree) by barbara hudson on Saturday February 29 2020, @03:35AM

              by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Saturday February 29 2020, @03:35AM (#964493) Journal

              That's your opinion, but it doesn't stand up to reality. Most people lock their phones. They'd rather someone attempt 10 times to unlock it, and brick the phone, rather than have someone else access to their data.

              And if you admit you wrote down your pin, you're not covered for any loses by unauthorized withdrawals on your debit card. Which is more likely to be discovered if you leave a dozen copies floating around.

              It's always better to lose all your data than to have someone else have access to it.

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