In the olden days (circa 1995) there were precious few Cert providers (Verisign, Thawte, and few others) and they vetted you, because SSL certs are about trust,

In the olden days (circa 1995) there were precious few Cert providers (Verisign, Thawte, and few others) and they vetted you, because SSL certs are about trust, not about encryption. As a result, Certs were bloody expensive. In order to get the cert for dsac.dla.mil (the computer shop inside the US Defense Logistics Agency) we provided reference to the act of Congres establishing the DLA, and then the command chain that proved that my boss had the rights/responsibility for the SSL cert for the domain. The process could take weeks, but in the end you could trust that the server on the other end was who they claimed to be. Fast forward tot he internet boom, and everybody needed a cert, and there folks realized that generating certs was physically easy, and could be lucrative, so they started selling cheaper and cheaper certs. but you can't vet an organization for 29.95, so that aspect of SSL Certs was conveniently forgotten as the masses rushed onto the web. Everybody thinks SSL Certs are about the encryption. We know that the Cert only establishes the identity of the other party. The encryption is performed using a key which is shared after the cert is used to establish trust. So now, people are starting to realize that cheap certs don't provide trust, and we're seeing $1500 vetted certs again, and browsers that change colors to signify trust levels. However, to make this personal, I have a Comodo cert that I got for free with domain registration at namecheap, and a bunch of browsers don't want to trust it. So I'm stuck between not having revenues to buy a super-cert, and having people refuse to use my app because their browser is saying my app's cert isn't trustworthy, and they aren't technical enough to override the warning. So will these $50 wildcard certs fare any better?