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Comment by sakjur | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn’t you lose control over your own money if you lost your private key?

The point is you have total control over your key. You don't control the banks and there's no guarantee you can always get your money from them.

What if you get Dementia (or even die) and forget the password?

It's possible to have set up a second password with a trusted third party, but then you have to trust that entity the same way you trust the bank - not just against them stealing your money, but against other parties hacking their systems and recovering your keys.

It’s also possible to split your seed phrase into n pieces, requiring m of them to recover it, and give those pieces to third parties. You don’t need to trust any individual or entity, but together they can get your keys if you lose them or die.

Various other approaches exist, too.

At this point in my life, it's much more likely that a bank will lock down my funds than that I will get dementia and lose access to my keys.

I know nothing in IT is certain. But I am pretty sure anyone can come up with a simple (or complex) backup solution that suits them and is 99.99% safe.

It's always about that 0.01%.

And expecting people to come up with their own solutions for problems that banks struggle to solve, is going to be a recipe for disaster for 99.99% of the people.

Couldnt that 0.01% be solved by coming physically with a photo ID card or a passport and legal papers to some trusted employee ?

And we’re back to where banks are today. Stopping fraud is a very tough problem to solve remotely.

The optimal amount of ....... is non zero

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