> If you are careful when generating your certificate (that is, careful to generate a subject certificate, and not a CA certificate) and can reliably distribute your certificate to all clients you are interested in, then self-signed certificates are usually much better than the public CA system.

Indeed, and the blockchain (combined with a proxy like DNSChain), can be used to do this securely and for free at-scale.

> Encrypted, authenticated: little padlock.

Neither self-signed nor CA-signed certificates are securely authenticated, so the padlock is completely misleading.

See this comment for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826443