If one would make a list of things that can go wrong, starting from the supply chain that delivers parts to the manufacturer, malicious employees at the manufacturer, mistakes the manufacturer can make, attacks on the delivery chain from the manufacturer to the user, to mistakes the user can make creating, using and storing their keys - the list would contain hundreds of points.
Seriously, that's why we have banks, still.
What do you use to access your bank account online? I use my laptop, or my phone.
For inter-bank transactions involving a scam that causes the customer to “voluntarily” send money it depends on the rail. But US ACH rules cover reversals due to fraud and have pretty substantial rules about it.
Nothing in this world tends to be "the solution", everything has tradeoffs.
Say you want to do self-custody, what is then the best option? "Don't do self-custody" obviously isn't the solution, as the core use case here is self-custody, so what in your opinion is a better way, than hardware wallets?
If there is nothing better today than hardware wallets, then for now, they are "one of the better solutions" for how to do self-custody, even with the current tradeoffs. But again, I'm eager to hear what the alternatives are.
From a bird's-eye perspective, 3 things are needed: Create a key, derive an address from the key, store the key.
Creating a key safely is possible with dice. You would probably create a seed phrase instead of a key directly, but for this discussion it is the same.
Deriving an address from the key is hard and I have not yet seen a good protocol on how to do it. I have read through a bunch of descriptions of how people do it and they are all weak and brittle. The most popular seems to be "I order a hardware wallet and follow the instructions that come with it". But even people who put a lot of thought into it come up with weak and brittle approaches. I would think there is a way to do it safely. But I have never seen a description of one yet. It might involve multiple computers, multiple software implementations and a hell lot of work to create a multisig that is not prone to a single attack vector.
Storing the key is the hardest. The most popular was seem to store it in a drawer or a safe. So now those coins are just as safe as a piece of gold would be. I am not sure if there is a way to tackle this at all. I can't think of one.
Cytobit•55m ago
mitxela•41m ago
numpad0•37m ago