AI-written post. Drops a “subtle” example for a crypto wallet at the end.

I'm pretty confident that the current system is the way it is because it's a sweet spot between user friendliness and difficulty of spoofing and/or impersonation. Slide it one way in either direction and the other gets worse.

Does not address root issue(s) nor elephants in the room; i.e. the underlying centrality in the world context beforehand. The call to simplicity can as-easily if not more-rapidly veer dystopian without asserting any kind of world context

Agreed it's bad. No basis for changing it provided. No premise for 'better' there. No actual thought

I think this highly depends on what country you live in. In NL and I have never entered a credit card number in a webshop to do a purchase ever. Just hit the "Pay" button; redirects to my bank; I get a notification on my phone; Hit fingerprint to unlock; approve; paid. Been that way for more than a decade

And I can call my bank when I get scammed unlike whatever crypto thing you're trying to sell in this post

Yes, email and the web and credit cards are designed wrong and we all need to download crypto wallet #574 advertised at the end of the article.

>The internet was built without a native way to prove who you are and move value securely. But now, for the first time, that missing piece (example...

I earnestly thought "Apple Pay" was going to be the example, and this post's title would be updated with [2014]. I'm not clear how the vault solves a problem anybody has in an era where Apple Pay and its contemporaries exist. I'm fairly sure if you'd described the Apple/Google Pay features to someone in 1990, they'd think something approximating "yeah that sounds like a good target".

When it works, it works great. But how about when it don't?

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Passkey - what would happens when we lost the device? You need some kind of recovery, right?

Social recovery - of course you could do that. Are you doing one recovery for all accounts (which require some kind of "wallet" stored in a centralized location - and can be disabled)? Or one for each services (which may make your grinder account known to your family)?

How about tourists? When you lost your phone while you are traveling in other country, what should you do?

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The internet is built the wrong way, using emails and passwords, users and recovery links. Here is the solution, an app that uses your email and uses a password to create a user name but has no recovery link. That's the advantage.

> Imagine a simple tool…One app…it lets you pay for things all in one place

It’s a shame not many have experienced where two such apps exist. Welcome to the wonderful convenience called Alipay and WeChat.

The core problem TFA describes isn't complexity, capitalism, or bots. It's the lack of trust. People are fine w/ a few big players (or even one big player) as long as you can trust them, but we don't trust the players anymore: Google, Mastercard, our governments, etc. We think they're all corrupt, and broadly we're right [0].

Blockchain's answer is "OK we give up on trust", but humans can't live that way--or at least strongly don't want to. Successful markets, courts, schools, workplaces, all arise out of a culture of trust and accountability, not the other way around. Unless we hold these institutions accountable they will inevitably decay; our markets will become lemon markets; our courts will become kangaroo courts; our schools will become insipid daycares; our workplaces will become surveillance salt mines. There is no technology that allows us to abdicate our duty to justice and to each other.

There's this episode of Star Trek: TNG [1] where the crew rescues some 20th century humans. One's a blowhard who keeps using ship-wide communications to make random demands, so Picard finally marches down to the guy's quarters to explain that comms are for ship business only. The guy is like "well if they're so important why don't they require an executive key?", to which Picard replies "we're aboard a starship so that is not necessary, we're all capable of exercising self-discipline".

There is no tech, no bureaucracy, no system of rules and regulations that can save a culture unwilling to save itself, whose answer to "what is acceptable to do" is "anything that isn't explicitly illegal, and sometimes explicitly illegal stuff depending on how much money you have". If we spent 1/100 of the effort on community building as we did zk-snarks or whatever the fuck, we simply wouldn't have these problems. Or as the kids say I guess, touch grass.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JcQxfhcg2Q

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQYbKT_rMg

Oh dear lord, as someone who is all in for decentralization, it actually makes me worry what crypto has become / was..

Here is an article that I created just in this response right now, I am sorry that y'all would have to click on it and see but I don't want to clutter hackernews comments with a really really long paragraph

https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...

Most of it is just written in first draft ofc but I have been thinking to write something along these lines for a long time. It drives me absolutely nuts how bitcoin was meant to be "digital gold" and we truly have digital gold on blockchain (paxg) but nobody seems to care that much about it. I feel insane thinking about it.

Anyways, I hope you guys have a great day, maybe give what I wrote a read and we can discuss it in this comments. I might upload it as a standalone hn post if people find it interesting but my goal right now was to vent of all the anger that I have so its definitely not structured rightly but still. anyways, have a good day.