1. It's not an "underground currency". It's more above ground than any other currency.
2. Many banks and businesses have closed up and taken people's assets with them. What did stockholders of WaMu get? Where is your rant against banks and the dollar?
3. If you throw out a hard drive with your only copy of any file, you lose that file. The lesson here is to make backups of important documents.
1. Bitcoins are "underground" in the sense that they are not officially sanctioned nor regulated, and therefore are not considered legal tender by any nation of this world. Trading in bitcoins is "underground" and unregulated and untaxable or trackable by financial Markets. Because of this.. we do lead onto point 2
2. Security and stability. Banks (in developed nations other than the US) are heavily regulated entities that are heavily insured against loss and fraud that must maintain specific ratios of money to debt (tack ratio) to ensure that those who use those banks are not able to lose everythign they have by the banks negligence or failures.
3. Banks that are regulated have stringent security and backup in place to ensure that data cannot be lost in any measurable way. Since Bitcoins are stored locally (usually) to your own computer, YOU are ulitimately responsible for the well being and keeping of that Wallet keychain. Most people at home do not have offsite storage. Nor in depth backup strategies to ensure that they can never lose their wallets. Banks on the other hands, even if their home building were to blow up, Most will continue to operate without a single loss of data.
Source: I am an analyst for financial institution software platforms that are used in major banks around the world. Responsible for planning, installation, support, implementations and Disaster recover.
These all point that Bitcoins, until it is recognised at a national level, or institute some form of stringent regulations will be a "wild west" of commodity trading. And I doubt governments are going to jump aboard the bitcoin bandwagon. Most established countries already have their own currency model. And should Bitcoins become regulated like the financial industry, you would lose the core purpose most people like bitcoins... the "anonymous freedom"
The whole reason this will eventually go down? Taxes. Bitcoins trading isn't taxed because it's not regulated. By technicalities, anyone who deals with bitcoins will need to do their accounting to convert Bitcoins on book to their local currency to claim income and taxes.
However, since it's unregulated and untaxable currently, Governments are going to keep a very close eye on it. it also doesn't help that Bitcoins, due to their Anonymous nature are a prime mover for laundering money or terrorist funding.
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I'm curious on what's the success rate for those so called attacks. All I'm seeing are phishing tricks, which are user based attacks, not OS attacks. No matter how secured an OS can be, you can't stop people from being naive or stupid. I haven't heard 1 case where OS X security itself was attacked and broken.
Very interesting question! similar towards Windows 7+8 i guess.
No platform is secure if you can convince the weakest link to bypass security measures.
As usual, it's not the OS thats really at fault, but the PEBKAC
