[zeestephen]

RE: “If you turned over ownership of your bitcoins to an exchange, you own nothing.”

If you cannot place your BitCoins in a common pool without losing ownership, the entire framework of our financial system collapses.

Goodbye, stocks and bonds.

Goodbye, home mortgages and car loans.

Goodbye, new business creation.

By the way.....

Do you have to type in your address key every time you make a transaction?

If that is done electronically at the point-of-sale, on your device or theirs, isn't that a huge security risk?

[palmer]

The reason why people entrust their stocks to a brokerage is a high degree of centralization and regulation. Bitcoin rejects centralization and regulation so that the idea of having a "safe" place where someone else your bitcoins makes no sense at all. They have nearly perfect safety in the chain and you can make the private key as safe as you like.

Goodbye, new business creation.

That's completely wrong. To start a new business in the bitcoin world takes merely a few of them to pay people to create the digital infrastructure. Even in the real world there's no reason that a solely owned business needs a "framework" to sustain it.

Do you have to type in your address key every time you make a transaction?

Oh my. You have to read up on PKI. Private keys are private and public keys (addresses) are public. Everyone knows the address of your bitcoin whether or not they associate those with you. Privacy of addresses is a separate issue and not a security issue, PKI is designed that way. All addresses are all there in the chain and always readable all the time. The private key unlocks the amount and transfers it to new owner(s) potentially creating a new smaller amount for you as well. That can be assigned to that same address (unlocked with the same private key) or a new address. Obviously nobody needs your private key to assign you an amount or for any other reason. They only need your public key (i.e. address).

If that is done electronically at the point-of-sale, on your device or theirs, isn't that a huge security risk?

No. The private key never leaves your device. They are typically encrypted with a passphrase so even if someone imaged your entire device they still would not have the private keys. What happens is that the wallet creates a transaction assign some bitcoins to new addresses (which can include one or more of your addresses). The wallet then asks for your passphrase, decrypts the private key, signs the transaction, and removes the plaintext private key from memory. There is a point of vulnerability which is that the private key has to be decrypted to be used to sign the transaction. But obviously they try to keep that as brief as possible.