At the last minute I decided to go to the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, FL. I bought the plane tickets on Friday and flew out on Monday. It was worth it. My favorite presentation was given by John McAfee yesterday.
TL;DR: Get a Trezor, Ledger, or other hardware wallet / offline solution or you will lose your coins.
Part 1
Part 2
IMO this was the best presentation at the conference. John gave a no nonsense run down on the state of Bitcoin and altcoin security and usability and steps that need to be taken in order to improve both.
The chinese are way too smart not to know that some cryptocurrency is going to become the world standard.
The Chinese virtually are in control of Bitcoin. So they are not going to kill the prodigal child [which is going to] bring them in the future great power and control.
Antivirus software is non-functional.
I know people who keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bitcoins on smartphones. That money will disappear some day. Guaranteed.
Hackers will do a sweep in one day and 200,000 people will lose everything they have in Bitcoin.
[Using cryptocurrencies] is hard. So, you wonder why the userbase is as small as it is.
Bitcoin is hugely powerful.
(Paraphrase: we need to get together and make a secure, easy to use way to use cryptocurrencies.)
p.s. John is building a 40 Peta Hash Bitcoin mine in Washington state.
p.p.s. I do not agree with John's conclusion that mining centralization in China is basically OK. No one country should control Bitcoin. This is a problem.