Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

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Besides the battles over efficiency (it's bad) and novelty (it's not really), there are some truly fundamental blockers to adopting cryptocurrencies. For instance, this poor Redditor lost the keys to a wallet with $40,000 of crypto in it [1]. This happens all the time. Being your own bank is literally the worst. Plenty of jokes ensued:

"It's just like the time I lost my car keys and need to buy a new car next day."

"It’s just like the time that I lost my house keys and had to move into a homeless shelter."

"It's just like the time I forgot my personal question to my 401k account and I got locked out forever, nobody could help me, and I lost the entire balance."

Unlike all the efficiency and speed questions, this part here is a stated, inalienable objective of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This is the expected behavior. Some clown designed it to work like this. Imagine grandma trying to use this. Remember that time PayPal locked your account and you were so mad you couldn't get at your $600 for a few weeks? Now imagine you lost your life savings because you can't remember your password and literally nobody can help you now, or ever again - and thats the point.

I'd imagine it'll destroy itself anyways, it seems like any random walk ends in 100% of coins lost to human inability to preserve access.

Who cares how amazing the system is technically? It's designed to be actively hostile to human users.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/RP7ighy.jpg

Of course having access to the private key, need to be the most basic way to access funds. It's the only thing that's guaranteed to be uncensorable, while minimizing the requirement of trust. It is a big responsibility though, and should not be taken lightly. The crypto-currency community is partly at fault here, for blaring memes like "If you don't control your private keys, it's not your Bitcoin", without any regard for whether or not people are ready for that responsibility.

That being said, there are number of ways you can store your crypto-currency, with varying degrees of trust-minimization:

- Use a multi-signature smart contract wallet, where a master key has power to move the money. If the master key is lost, the money can be moved by X out of Y keys signing off on the transaction. You can then distribute the Y keys to your trusted associates, preferably without telling them who the other key-holders are.

- Use a dead-hand smart contract wallet, where the money can be retrieved by a trusted associate, if the dead-hand switch hasn't been activated within Z amount of time. Can be combined with the above, in case further trust minimization is needed.

- Store your crypto-currency at a FDIC exchange. Pretty much the same model as the banking world. This really should be the go to way for the average Joe, as it mirrors what you currently can expect from online-banking.

>Store your crypto-currency at a FDIC exchange.

I'm pretty sure the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation doesn't cover crypto. I know what you mean but even with the more reputable players like Coinbase of Kracken I'm a bit wary of the oops we got hacked / shut down / we can't give to you due to AML type stuff.

The first two are way too complicated for retail banking customers. Do you really think you can explain to your parents how dead handed multi pantsed wallets work? I stopped reading half a line in and I’m well within the target customer group here.

The third, an exchange, violates all the core principals of cryptocurrency and is basically no different than what we have today but way harder and less efficient. Exchanges don’t require crypto they just run a MySQL store and attribute fractional ownership as centralized, opaque records not protected by the blockchain. If everyone just did that because it’s the simplest and easiest and most secure way to hold on to your coins, cryptocurrency would just replace bank to bank transfers which by definition don’t require a trustless backing and all the worlds electricity.

Plus to quote your fellow converts “not your keys, not your coins.”

I comment on these issues on Reddit all the time and get downvoted to hell. People there just don’t want to hear it.

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