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> [...] the "lose your key, lose your wallet" thing is fundamentally incompatible with real users. Humans need to be able to recover from their mistakes. Maybe

> [...] the "lose your key, lose your wallet" thing is fundamentally incompatible with real users. Humans need to be able to recover from their mistakes. Maybe it's my memory playing tricks, or I've only seen the good articles, but I believe nearly every single article about setting up a self-managed crypto wallet had stressed out the importance of having a backup. Serious ones had even explained the 3-2-1 rule. Then the hype came, with it came scams and pumps-and-dumps and NFTs and whatever, and crypto became a clusterfuck that a lot of people didn't want to touch. Yuck. That's probably the one thing cryptocurrency communities undeniably got right. Quite unlike the Passkeys, where I've yet to see any official or semi-official demo site that even has a flow for adding a second token (some actual sites do, but not the demos). We should start teaching basic backup strategies in schools. It's not some advanced rocket science, and it's a knowledge that's useful to anyone who deals with information (that is, literally anyone participating in the modern society). Also, this user unfriendliness is extremely temporary, because computers and Internet are new (at the scale of societies), and there are plenty of folks who had only started to use them later in their lives. After you lose some file or account (ideally, as a kid, so it's not something serious) you start to understand the old adage about those whose do backups and those who don't do them _yet_.

antifa 2y ago
How many forms of backup survive "the government threw you in prison for years?" Even Gmail will refuse to authenticate a correct password with "we couldn't verify it was you" if you never binded your account to a phone and just got out of prison 3 years later.
- drdaeman 2y ago
  Uh, well, in context of crypto - your (self-owned) crypto wallet totally would work. As for email... Sure, I guess it depends on the service and their policies. But here's an anecdote. A few years ago, I've managed to log in in to a completely forgotten 10+ years old email account, finding its password in an old backup. It worked. ¯\(ツ)/¯ If an user cannot log in with a valid credentials, without brute-forcing them, after some years of absence, it's absolutely the service's fault. Of course, in the modern world, customer issues mean nothing so anything goes. But -quoting GP post - when designing a "fantasy football" alternate authentication system for the Internet, this probably shouldn't be a thing.
karmajunkie 2y ago
i think you’re sidestepping the parent’s point: if it depends on users doing the right thing every time, it’s not compatible with the real world. yes, the advice about wallets is “make a backup”. the advice about passwords is “don’t reuse them”, yet the VAST majority of users use the same password for banking, email, and their phone provider. so what do you think the chances are that your average user makes a backup of their wallet AND remember where it is in three years? pretty much zero.
Vegenoid 2y ago
> I believe nearly every single article about setting up a self-managed crypto wallet had stressed out the importance of having a backup. Serious ones had even explained the 3-2-1 rule. Yes, this is why it is incompatible with widespread adoption. Most people do not want to do this, and in fact could not do so effectively without learning and thinking a good deal more about computers and risk scenarios, which they don’t want to do and will not do. You are correct that it is a solution. However, it is not a solution that will ever be adopted on a wide scale.
- drdaeman 2y ago
  > Most people do not want to do this Yes, and I think that's not because they don't want to do it but because: 1) they don't know that they should do this; 2) they don't know why should they do this; 2) they don't know how to do this; 3) because even the systems marketed as current state-of-art (Passkeys) are poorly designed and don't even allow to have proper 3-2-1 backups conveniently (can't enroll a device sitting in a safe, it must be physically brought online which beats the whole point of offsite backups). Design it to make backups and failover secure yet easy, available out-of-box, and explicitly recommending best practices to follow - and everyone will do it as a no-brainer, at least for anything they care about. Until recently no one told people to not reuse passwords. Even today most password-based signup forms just ask for password and maybe tell the requirements (length, characters) but extremely rarely they explain anything about uniqueness, randomness or anything else. No surprise it sucks hard in practice, when nearly everyone ignores the education aspect. People aren't stupid. At least in general. They're just blissfully unaware about a lot of things, especially the older generations. What is impossible in real world is designing a fantasy football nanny authentication system to "safeguard" them, without making a lot of undesirable sacrifices. We manage to explain people to not poke with scissors into electrical outlets (and make it hard to do so accidentally) - we can manage similar stuff with computers too.
  - Vegenoid 2y ago
    > We manage to explain people to not poke with scissors into electrical outlets (and make it hard to do so accidentally) - we can manage similar stuff with computers too. I don't think this is a good analogy, because the example is simply warning people of a thing not to do. It takes no effort. Maintaining backups does take effort. This is more like getting people to pick up a new chore, just like how many people see interacting with their bank and financial services as a chore. Many people who work in IT (or are into computers as a hobby) discount the effort it takes, because there is a lot less friction between them and computers than for the average person. > even the systems marketed as current state-of-art (Passkeys) are poorly designed and don't even allow to have proper 3-2-1 backups conveniently (can't enroll a device sitting in a safe, it must be physically brought online which beats the whole point of offsite backups). Design it to make backups and failover secure yet easy, available out-of-box, and explicitly recommending best practices to follow - and everyone will do it as a no-brainer, at least for anything they care about. People have been saying this for a long time. "We just need a better system!" The system doesn't exist because people don't want a system that requires effort. It requires effort to protect a secret that, if leaked or lost, would irreversibly result in your financial ruin. It requires a lot less ongoing effort (to a non computer savvy person) to use financial institutions to store their money securely. People will choose the system that safeguards them and makes sacrifices that many computer security and freedom oriented people will find undesirable. This is demonstrated by the choices that people have repeatedly made.

antifa 2y ago

How many forms of backup survive "the government threw you in prison for years?" Even Gmail will refuse to authenticate a correct password with "we couldn't verify it was you" if you never binded your account to a phone and just got out of prison 3 years later.

drdaeman 2y ago
Uh, well, in context of crypto - your (self-owned) crypto wallet totally would work. As for email... Sure, I guess it depends on the service and their policies. But here's an anecdote. A few years ago, I've managed to log in in to a completely forgotten 10+ years old email account, finding its password in an old backup. It worked. ¯\(ツ)/¯ If an user cannot log in with a valid credentials, without brute-forcing them, after some years of absence, it's absolutely the service's fault. Of course, in the modern world, customer issues mean nothing so anything goes. But -quoting GP post - when designing a "fantasy football" alternate authentication system for the Internet, this probably shouldn't be a thing.

karmajunkie 2y ago

i think you’re sidestepping the parent’s point: if it depends on users doing the right thing every time, it’s not compatible with the real world. yes, the advice about wallets is “make a backup”. the advice about passwords is “don’t reuse them”, yet the VAST majority of users use the same password for banking, email, and their phone provider. so what do you think the chances are that your average user makes a backup of their wallet AND remember where it is in three years? pretty much zero.

Vegenoid 2y ago

> I believe nearly every single article about setting up a self-managed crypto wallet had stressed out the importance of having a backup. Serious ones had even explained the 3-2-1 rule. Yes, this is why it is incompatible with widespread adoption. Most people do not want to do this, and in fact could not do so effectively without learning and thinking a good deal more about computers and risk scenarios, which they don’t want to do and will not do. You are correct that it is a solution. However, it is not a solution that will ever be adopted on a wide scale.

drdaeman 2y ago
> Most people do not want to do this Yes, and I think that's not because they don't want to do it but because: 1) they don't know that they should do this; 2) they don't know why should they do this; 2) they don't know how to do this; 3) because even the systems marketed as current state-of-art (Passkeys) are poorly designed and don't even allow to have proper 3-2-1 backups conveniently (can't enroll a device sitting in a safe, it must be physically brought online which beats the whole point of offsite backups). Design it to make backups and failover secure yet easy, available out-of-box, and explicitly recommending best practices to follow - and everyone will do it as a no-brainer, at least for anything they care about. Until recently no one told people to not reuse passwords. Even today most password-based signup forms just ask for password and maybe tell the requirements (length, characters) but extremely rarely they explain anything about uniqueness, randomness or anything else. No surprise it sucks hard in practice, when nearly everyone ignores the education aspect. People aren't stupid. At least in general. They're just blissfully unaware about a lot of things, especially the older generations. What is impossible in real world is designing a fantasy football nanny authentication system to "safeguard" them, without making a lot of undesirable sacrifices. We manage to explain people to not poke with scissors into electrical outlets (and make it hard to do so accidentally) - we can manage similar stuff with computers too.
- Vegenoid 2y ago
  > We manage to explain people to not poke with scissors into electrical outlets (and make it hard to do so accidentally) - we can manage similar stuff with computers too. I don't think this is a good analogy, because the example is simply warning people of a thing not to do. It takes no effort. Maintaining backups does take effort. This is more like getting people to pick up a new chore, just like how many people see interacting with their bank and financial services as a chore. Many people who work in IT (or are into computers as a hobby) discount the effort it takes, because there is a lot less friction between them and computers than for the average person. > even the systems marketed as current state-of-art (Passkeys) are poorly designed and don't even allow to have proper 3-2-1 backups conveniently (can't enroll a device sitting in a safe, it must be physically brought online which beats the whole point of offsite backups). Design it to make backups and failover secure yet easy, available out-of-box, and explicitly recommending best practices to follow - and everyone will do it as a no-brainer, at least for anything they care about. People have been saying this for a long time. "We just need a better system!" The system doesn't exist because people don't want a system that requires effort. It requires effort to protect a secret that, if leaked or lost, would irreversibly result in your financial ruin. It requires a lot less ongoing effort (to a non computer savvy person) to use financial institutions to store their money securely. People will choose the system that safeguards them and makes sacrifices that many computer security and freedom oriented people will find undesirable. This is demonstrated by the choices that people have repeatedly made.