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Comment by Xeoncross | Hacker News Reader

It's actually a little more complex than that. Many people go through computers several times between moving to each new social network. You have to also A) print and store the key (yikes), B) make sure you move the file to the new computer (easy now with migration assistance) or C) make sure you are backing up your computer (a lot less people use backups than should).

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How is that different from passwords, exactly? Okay, maybe you can remember the passwords for services you use on a daily basis, but I must have a couple of hundred passwords to deal with, at least. Password managers can help with the data overload, but only at the cost of introducing the same single point of failure as a private key, and arguably a less-secure one.

You can use the "forgot password" dialog for passwords.

It’s not different from just a password. That’s why no service uses an unrecoverable password as the only authentication mechanism because it would be a terrible usability and security problem.

Ordinary people expect to be able to reset forgotten passwords. And because people are bad at managing passwords, reasonable services try to get them to use 2FA so their accounts wouldn’t get stolen. A service that uses plain private keys has both problems.

> it would be a terrible usability and security problem.

Compared to, say, someone being able to compromise every account you have because you walked away from your desktop or phone while logged into email?

Just email the private key to yourself, or store in your password manager for hacker types.

In addition to the other points, "regular users" unfortunately still quite often use only a few passwords, shared between all their services. So only 3-4 passwords (and variations) to remember!

I don't know anybody who has no data they care for.

Everybody has some data they never don't want to lose.

So the Nostr key would be just another piece of such data.

Also, losing it would not that much of a desaster. Use a new key, and let people know about it via other channels.

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