02 July 2014 / Wall Street Journal – Coinbase, one of the big bitcoin-services companies, has unveiled a new type of account for storing bitcoins, “the vault.”

The new account, which the company describes on its blog, now allows users to have two different kinds of accounts: a “wallet” for day-to-day spending, and a “vault” for long-term storage of their wealth. The vault features a raft of security measures that protect a user’s money, and also makes moving money out of the account a slower, more deliberate process.

It will initially be rolled out to a small number of randomly selected users, with plans to offer it to all the company’s customers over the next two weeks.

“We do know there’s a lot of interest in the bitcoin community in vault products,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong told MoneyBeat. ”Our customers have been asking for something like this for a year.”

The new measures help address one of the persistent criticisms of the entire bitcoin experience: relatively lax security around wallets, the nickname for the online accounts used to store bitcoins. Anybody who lost their money in the Mt. Gox debacle can attest to that. In many cases, all a scammer needs is to trick a user into revealing their “private key” to gain access to their wallet. This happens more often than you might think…… Read more

http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/07/02/coinbase-adds-new-type-of-bitcoin-account-the-vault/