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It's interesting to consider why that is. I could start a BitCoin deposit insurance company, for example: you'd pay me X% of your balance each month, and I'd make you whole in the event of fraud.

Of course, I'd want all sorts of regulations on how you set this up; I might sell you some kind of extra-secure system for managing your balance, for example. At that point, the market would basically be putting a price on BitCoin security.

Obviously, my deposit insurance scheme could go broke, if I price it wrong. That's theoretically a risk with SIPC. It's not a risk with the FDIC, since that is ultimately backed by the government's ability to print an unlimited amount of money.

So it might make more sense to say that deposit insurance is a feature of unstable currencies: if anyone's dollar-denominated debt can be 100% guaranteed by the government, then the value of everyone's dollar-denominated assets will face an inflation tax to pay for this guarantee.




Maybe I'm missing some detail of the scheme you're proposing, or have some fundamental misunderstanding of bitcoin, but if bitcoin is anonymous and untraceable, how do you prevent insurance fraud?


You could only insure bitcoin that is stored in a wallet that you control (i.e. act as a bank).


Wouldn't this also defeat the purpose of BitCoin in the first place? And by "purpose" I'm referring to the whole "anonymous, untraceable" aspect of it. It's very much like cash - it's anonymous, yes, but also if it gets stolen there's not much you can do about it.


It would be nice to have that option. "Anonymous, untreacable, and un-recoverable, or not-so-anonymous, somewhat traceable, and recoverable."

Plus, I'd bet that you could create an onion router-style arrangement with multiple off-shore banks in different jurisdictions.




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