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Comment by ecaron | Hacker News Reader

It may not be a big market that the masses are clamoring for, but it will soon be similar to services encrypting passwords in the database. The outside world shouldn't be expected to know about the existence of rainbow tables and the futility of md5-hashes. The educated, however, know what to demand, will expect their services to offer it, and will leave lacking-services for support-services - and in their exodus the masses inevitably follow (e.g. Hotmail -> GMail)

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I think you are right. The only thing holding back cryptography from being widely adopted is the lack of a service that makes strong cryptography super easy to setup and use. I know this isn't a trivial task, but it's not impossible to implement strong crypto in a user-friendly way.

> The educated, however, know what to demand, will expect their services to offer it, and will leave lacking-services for support-services - and in their exodus the masses inevitably follow (e.g. Hotmail -> GMail)

That's not how it works.

People didn't leave Hotmail because the "educated" left, they left it because Google gave several GBs for free, the interface was simpler, the search better and MS was out of fashion.

If you're not a large market you don't get a service, or you only get niche vendors to cater to you. You can bypass this by setting trends for the "uneducated" (whatever that means), else we will all be using Lisp Machines or Smalltalk environments.

Educated/uneducated may not be the right terms, but it is possible to have hindsight just by understanding the landscape.

Privacy is becoming a large problem in the internet and encryption will likely be part of the solution. Without encryption, the ownership of data is on the service provider instead of the person.

Privacy is a feature just like free storage. One day, privacy can be available to the masses just like storage is today. (also think back how many people actually wanted or needed multiple gb of free storage for their emails until one was provided by a service like gmail)

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