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As I've noted before on HN the entire concept of people being able to manage their own wallets flies against everything we know about people. People forget stuf
by kkielhofner 4y ago
As I've noted before on HN the entire concept of people being able to manage their own wallets flies against everything we know about people. People forget stuff, make mistakes, and lose things. The margin of error for a wallet is tiny. It's not rare for crypto forums, twitter, etc to prescribe completely ridiculous processes and systems for securing wallets, backing up seed phrases, etc. There's an entire cottage industry built around people etching their seed phrases on steel plates for people to (I'm not kidding) bury them like they're gold in the 1800s.
Plus funds in a wallet require extra steps when you want to trade on an exchange (extra costs via gas, time, possible errors, etc). The use cases for crypto are so minimal for the general population one could argue it's only survived this long through making trades on exchanges - to what essentially amounts to gambling. You can't gamble with funds in a wallet which defeats the entire purpose of crypto for the vast majority of the "users" in the space.
- nanna 4y ago> As I've noted before on HN One of the joys of HN is that on the whole no one knows who anyone else really is nor keeps track of what they've argued previously.
- skinnymuch 4y agoSome of us put out real info in our profiles.
- zen21 4y agoSome people copy and paste other people’s profile info into their profiles.
- CliffStoll 4y agosome of us use our real names
- skinnymuch 4y agohaha I never thought of that.
- dmitriid 4y agoSome of us are meat popsicles.
- timemct 4y ago> There's an entire cottage industry built around people etching their seed phrases on steel plates for people to (I'm not kidding) bury them like they're gold in the 1800s. "I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted." - The Well of Ascension, by Brandon Sanderson
- bussierem 4y agoI know this type of comment (and my own) is more common to reddit and commonly frowned upon in HN threads, but by god this made my morning thank you.
- poulpi 4y agoActually, if you want something to stay, you should go for stone rather than metal. Stone have low market value while metal can always be melted to do something else (like weapons). It's one of my main take away of my art history lessons -> most antic art done on metal has been lost, but the stone remains!
- itronitron 4y agoA friend of mine would use fiberglass resin, bondo, and plywood because they wanted their sculptures, which they then boxed into custom-sized crates, to last for at least one hundred years.
- inasio 4y agoThat was also what they went with in the 3 body problem
- smileybarry 4y ago> There's an entire cottage industry built around people etching their seed phrases on steel plates for people to (I'm not kidding) bury them like they're gold in the 1800s. I was stunned to see so many of these products on Amazon last time I searched for smartcard stuff. On that note, I hate that you can't search for smartcard products anymore without 80% of your results being crypto wallets.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoPrint your private key on paper and lose it all when your house burns down. vs Give your private key to an exchange, and enrich the shitheads running the exchange when they run away with your money. First option seems preferable. If you're going to lose your money, better for the money to be truly lost than to enrich a thief.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 8ytecoder 4y agoPrint your key works fine if I’m locking my “money” under a mattress. If the point of Bitcoin I was to replace currency then I’d still need an easy way to keep it close with my all times. So, carry your signed transfer title to your house in the wallet and lose your entire house to a mugging seems more appropriate as an analogy.
- andybak 4y ago> If you're going to lose your money, better for the money to be truly lost than to enrich a thief. I'd quite like an option C
- HideousKojima 4y agoBecome a goldbug?
- nemo44x 4y agoYou could put it in a fireproof safe or a safety deposit box or both.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- horsawlarway 4y agoCan we acknowledge that both of those options are utter trash compared to conventional banking, though? The system that the crypto advocates hate on, but provides 250k per person + per bank + per account type as insurance by default to all registered financial institutions?
- boppo1 4y ago>There's an entire cottage industry built around people etching their seed phrases on steel plates for people to (I'm not kidding) bury them like they're gold in the 1800s. I was about to say this isn't the worst opsec until I realized you mean people are sending businesses their passphrases and not purchasing an etching kit to make the plate themselves.
- ChadNauseam 4y agoYour first instinct was right, they come with little steel squares with individual letters pre-etched, and when you receive them you arrange them yourself into your seed phrase
- SV_BubbleTime 4y agoThe venn of arts and crafts, paranoid delusions, and blockchain.
- sydd 4y agoHeh I would not call them paranoid after all these crypto collapses. Say I'd have $100000 in a crypto wallet, I'd etch it too and keep it in a safe instead of giving it to a website with no state backed guarantees.
- danaris 4y agoThe delusion part is believing that it would still be worth $100k after an amount of time that would warrant burying something in the ground.
- zukzuk 4y agoThe paranoia pertains to burying metal plates underground, preparing for a post-collapse future. As if bitcoin will be a viable currency when we're all trying to figure out food and shelter.
- 4y ago
- Animats 4y agoThere's a market here for a safe way to store crypto. Something like a thing you carry with you, a thing you can keep at home, a thing you have a friend hold, a thing you have in a safety deposit box, and info a service holds for you. Some combination of majority votes, time delays in days or weeks, and warning messages lets you recover from loss and damage. With backup from an insurance company. But nobody has addressed that market.
- bredren 4y agoVariations of this have been tried many times, for example hardware wallets. But a lot of this is too troublesome or adds too many hoops to jump through than is practical for many people.
- Animats 4y agoYes. Someone has to get the user experience right.
- bredren 4y agoFWIW, that user experience is most likely Coinbase, or something very much like Coinbase. Not only is the UX good, but customer funds are taken seriously now and have been for a long time.
- Animats 4y agoCoinbase still has custody of customer assets, though. That's what has to be either eliminated or insured to avoid trouble.
- bredren 4y agoTo avoid what trouble, specifically? If it’s risk of customer funds mismanagement, coinbase is just not in the same galaxy as the folks who have blown customer trust. If it’s securing funds, to prevent hacks, CB offers cold storage. Lumps of crypto can be transferred out of their control as needed to manage risk.