> If the answer is "they just don't get access anymore" or "a panel of their peers attests to them", your fantasy authentication system also needs a fantasy species of sentient beings to serve as users, because it won't work for humans.
This has been my single biggest argument against blockchain/cryptocurrency stuff for years: the "lose your key, lose your wallet" thing is fundamentally incompatible with real users.
Humans need to be able to recover from their mistakes.
> [...] the "lose your key, lose your wallet" thing is fundamentally incompatible with real users. Humans need to be able to recover from their mistakes.
Maybe it's my memory playing tricks, or I've only seen the good articles, but I believe nearly every single article about setting up a self-managed crypto wallet had stressed out the importance of having a backup. Serious ones had even explained the 3-2-1 rule. Then the hype came, with it came scams and pumps-and-dumps and NFTs and whatever, and crypto became a clusterfuck that a lot of people didn't want to touch. Yuck.
That's probably the one thing cryptocurrency communities undeniably got right. Quite unlike the Passkeys, where I've yet to see any official or semi-official demo site that even has a flow for adding a second token (some actual sites do, but not the demos).
We should start teaching basic backup strategies in schools. It's not some advanced rocket science, and it's a knowledge that's useful to anyone who deals with information (that is, literally anyone participating in the modern society).
Also, this user unfriendliness is extremely temporary, because computers and Internet are new (at the scale of societies), and there are plenty of folks who had only started to use them later in their lives. After you lose some file or account (ideally, as a kid, so it's not something serious) you start to understand the old adage about those whose do backups and those who don't do them _yet_.
> I believe nearly every single article about setting up a self-managed crypto wallet had stressed out the importance of having a backup. Serious ones had even explained the 3-2-1 rule.
Yes, this is why it is incompatible with widespread adoption. Most people do not want to do this, and in fact could not do so effectively without learning and thinking a good deal more about computers and risk scenarios, which they don’t want to do and will not do.
You are correct that it is a solution. However, it is not a solution that will ever be adopted on a wide scale.
Yes, and I think that's not because they don't want to do it but because:
1) they don't know that they should do this;
2) they don't know why should they do this;
2) they don't know how to do this;
3) because even the systems marketed as current state-of-art (Passkeys) are poorly designed and don't even allow to have proper 3-2-1 backups conveniently (can't enroll a device sitting in a safe, it must be physically brought online which beats the whole point of offsite backups).
Design it to make backups and failover secure yet easy, available out-of-box, and explicitly recommending best practices to follow - and everyone will do it as a no-brainer, at least for anything they care about.
Until recently no one told people to not reuse passwords. Even today most password-based signup forms just ask for password and maybe tell the requirements (length, characters) but extremely rarely they explain anything about uniqueness, randomness or anything else. No surprise it sucks hard in practice, when nearly everyone ignores the education aspect.
People aren't stupid. At least in general. They're just blissfully unaware about a lot of things, especially the older generations. What is impossible in real world is designing a fantasy football nanny authentication system to "safeguard" them, without making a lot of undesirable sacrifices. We manage to explain people to not poke with scissors into electrical outlets (and make it hard to do so accidentally) - we can manage similar stuff with computers too.
> We manage to explain people to not poke with scissors into electrical outlets (and make it hard to do so accidentally) - we can manage similar stuff with computers too.
I don't think this is a good analogy, because the example is simply warning people of a thing not to do. It takes no effort. Maintaining backups does take effort. This is more like getting people to pick up a new chore, just like how many people see interacting with their bank and financial services as a chore.
Many people who work in IT (or are into computers as a hobby) discount the effort it takes, because there is a lot less friction between them and computers than for the average person.
> even the systems marketed as current state-of-art (Passkeys) are poorly designed and don't even allow to have proper 3-2-1 backups conveniently (can't enroll a device sitting in a safe, it must be physically brought online which beats the whole point of offsite backups).
Design it to make backups and failover secure yet easy, available out-of-box, and explicitly recommending best practices to follow - and everyone will do it as a no-brainer, at least for anything they care about.
People have been saying this for a long time. "We just need a better system!" The system doesn't exist because people don't want a system that requires effort. It requires effort to protect a secret that, if leaked or lost, would irreversibly result in your financial ruin. It requires a lot less ongoing effort (to a non computer savvy person) to use financial institutions to store their money securely.
People will choose the system that safeguards them and makes sacrifices that many computer security and freedom oriented people will find undesirable. This is demonstrated by the choices that people have repeatedly made.
People's bank accounts are irreversibly hacked, emptied, frozen, seized, blocked, impounded, garnished on a daily basis. That you haven't encountered it yet, doesn't mean it's not happening.
People should have a choice which system suits them more.
I strongly disagree, but I feel that the conversation would be pointless fight of beliefs, unless I actually design and showcase a solution that would be simple yet secure (and I don't want anything that takes effort) - but that will take me a while to work on.
The idea is that user shouldn't have any friction, besides meeting minimal requirements: 1) being capable of reading (or otherwise accessing the text) and comprehending simple instructions; and 2) having certain minimally required hardware or software installed.
I'm sure this is doable and every primitive to build this already exists and vetted by competent people. I'm sure it's possible for a layman non-technical person with normal cognitive capabilities to have a safe authentication solution (which is very different from data backups) with full ownership of their identities and credentials.
Sure there are people that cannot read or cannot comprehend things. A lot of people. I've seen way too many folks who had simple and clear ELI5-grade instructions with zero technical jargon - and nonetheless had failed to follow them because "computers hard". In some case it's the fault of UI or UX, but I strongly believe in most cases it's just learned helplessness - "computers are not my thing and they're hard" and brain shuts off instead of even trying to read. The only solutions are to 1) make them actually interested in achieving their goals (worked for my dad - man went from "I don't know and don't understand [and 'I don't want to' in the tone], order this for me" to suddenly figuring it all out and placing online orders in just a few minutes as soon as he actually needed something when I wasn't around to help), and 2) make sure they have all materials accessible, well structured and covering as many possible scenarios as possible so it's all there the moment they snap out of their learned helplessness. Nothing else works as it is fundamentally impossible to design anything that would work even if people don't read and don't think.
I have some sketches in my mind, specifically focusing on use by laypeople without making compromises about fundamentals (like what is identity - a lot of modern auth perverts this concept badly). I'll give it a try someday, actually drawing it all and writing notes on the inner workings. Wish there'd be a ten of me and we'd have 240 hours a day... Sorry.
> This is demonstrated by the choices that people have repeatedly made.
I'm afraid this is a very bad attitude to follow. The choices people had repeatedly made got us in quite a bad place. Just look at the poster child - IoT - it's a complete disaster. Online auth is in a very similar poor and messed up state, it just less visible.
I think we may be passing as ships in the night a little bit - that is, I thought we were talking about cryptocurrency wallets, and the merits of a system with authentication relying entirely on cryptographic secrets.
I wish you luck in your development of such a system. I don't disagree with anything you said about learned helplessness, and I think it can be fruitful to push individuals or groups to overcome it, but I think trying to do that to the general populace is like trying to change the wind.
Not reusing passwords at all is pretty impractical. If you really want to depend on a single password manager then you have some other issues. Usually I have settled for rotating, compartmentalized password modules which allows me to somewhat rather than fully contain a compromised password. And if your modular password has three slots (term taken from linguistics) then you can compose passwords which reuse parts, are memorizable, and not automatically reusable on other services.
The problem though is that since one has a number of passwords which may be different but closely related, a human may be able to infer a few possible passwords from a few compromised ones. In other words it still dramatically shrinks the key space an attacker might want to try to brute force. Preventing re-use is then a problem for 2fa regimes.
For my part I won't use passwords I cannot memorize and keep memorized in relation to the web site.
i think you’re sidestepping the parent’s point: if it depends on users doing the right thing every time, it’s not compatible with the real world.
yes, the advice about wallets is “make a backup”. the advice about passwords is “don’t reuse them”, yet the VAST majority of users use the same password for banking, email, and their phone provider. so what do you think the chances are that your average user makes a backup of their wallet AND remember where it is in three years?
How many forms of backup survive "the government threw you in prison for years?" Even Gmail will refuse to authenticate a correct password with "we couldn't verify it was you" if you never binded your account to a phone and just got out of prison 3 years later.
Uh, well, in context of crypto - your (self-owned) crypto wallet totally would work.
As for email... Sure, I guess it depends on the service and their policies. But here's an anecdote. A few years ago, I've managed to log in in to a completely forgotten 10+ years old email account, finding its password in an old backup. It worked. ¯\(ツ)/¯
If an user cannot log in with a valid credentials, without brute-forcing them, after some years of absence, it's absolutely the service's fault. Of course, in the modern world, customer issues mean nothing so anything goes. But -quoting GP post - when designing a "fantasy football" alternate authentication system for the Internet, this probably shouldn't be a thing.
> the "lose your key, lose your wallet" thing is fundamentally incompatible with real users.
You're allowed to store your key at the bank if this is an issue for you. It's less secure than memorizing it, but obviously equally as secure as your bank account is.
Are you referring to a physical lockbox? Because if so, that is certainly not as secure as your bank account, because criminals could not drain your bank account by breaking into a bank, nor could your account’s funds be lost if the physical location were destroyed by a flood or other disaster.
Even if you are referring to digital storage managed by the bank, presumably competently enough to avoid data loss, if that data is exfiltrated your wallet will be drained. It would be very difficult for a hacker to irreversibly drain your bank account (given the type and terms of the account, but will apply to most savings accounts), due to the protection and delay systems in place meant to catch fraudulent or unauthorized activity. Note that this definition of “unauthorized” actually means “not authorized by the human being who owns this account”, instead of the crypto definition of “not authorized by someone who knows the correct secret”.
"Mom, I already told you: you have to generate a key pair, split the private key into three parts using Shamir' secret sharing algorithm, then give each part to three banks. Whenever you want to use it, you have to go collect it from each of those banks---but DON'T write it down anywhere---and perform your transaction"
And to think the conversation started with an observation that people can't even remember one password.
I agree, there's miles of runway remaining for improving the UX. I actually think it'd be neat if a crypto had this (and a few other things) as a baked-in feature. i.e. In order to create a wallet in the first place, you need to identify e.g. 5 trusted friends who'll serve as recovery partners. Maybe it's initially tied to the same invite mechanic used to join the ecosystem. Could be done in a privacy-preserving (and to some degree anonymity-preserving) fashion. The right UI could make this even simpler than recovering a Gmail account. Everyone would just have it set up, and these conversations about losing your keys would be a relic of the past.
I don't understand why this was downvoted. In case it's not clear: (S)he's saying to split the key into multiple shares that can be used to reconstruct the key if you have a large enough quorum. Then store each share in a different place. As long as you don't lose too many of the shares, you'll be fine. And one baddie is NOT enough to get the key.
Either shuffling those keys stored in N different deposit boxes is overly complicated for a normal person, or it is not overly complicated for a moderately dedicated baddie either
Unless the "baddie" in this case is the government, why would it be easy for anyone to obtain access to multiple secrets stored in multiple boxes/banks?
Multisig is a pretty common setup for crypto and there is software that makes it easier.
"soerxpso" said "store your key at the bank", but you are saying "two or N places". So it sounds like 1 bank is less secure for your key then 1 bank is for your money, because you need two or more banks for your key, while 1 bank for your money is sufficient. Correct?
I stay away from everything crypto but I don't see the difference. In both cases if they didn't make it right you'd go to the courts and make your case that they are at fault and owe you compensation.
They're just different things. The FDIC insurance is for if the bank itself goes insolvent and they literally don't have enough money to cover their depositors' balances anymore. There's no reason a safe deposit box would be affected.
Yes, they are different things. A safe deposit box wouldn't be affected by the banks insolvency.
A safe deposit box may be affected by other things and if those things happen they don't have to "make it right", if you go to the courts and make your case you may find that they are not at fault and you are not owed any compensation.
Probably varies from bank to bank, but in my experience you have to specifically buy separate insurance if you want the content of your deposit box insured. The big problem from the bank's point of view is that, unlike your bank account, the bank doesn't know what you have in the box and thus has no idea what to insure it for and no way to verify any claim.
More importantly the bank doesn't profit more from something more valuable being in your safety deposit box so it doesn't make economic sense for them to be the one insuring it.
I might be mistaken, but are not several "traditional" banks offering crypto wallets for customers? Is there a realistic chance this kind of bank is going to steal their customers' crypto and going (at least, next to criminal investigations) bankrupt over it?
Sure, they could. Would that be any different from how a bank could steal funds from a traditional deposit account?
By making a bank the custodian of your crypto wallet, you're placing your trust in them and should have similar legal recourse you would have had with a fiat deposit.
I am not sure if you are objecting. Definitely you need to trust your bank if you are going store your crypto with them. I just do not see any large traditional bank stealing their customers' crypto and hoping to get away with it.
As far as I know all the cases of stolen crypto have been newly founded companies with their only business being your crypto. That is quite unlike the other kind of bank.
Yes obviously if your money is completely burned then it's gone, but that is generally pretty unlikely to happen. Losing your digital key is many orders of magnitude more likely to happen in my opinion. And there is - by design - absolutely no way to get it back. That makes using blockchain for anything serious completely untenable in my opinion.
It doesn't need to be completely burned to be gone:
"No redemption will be made when (...) Fragments and remnants presented which represent 50% or less of a note are identifiable as United States currency but the method of destruction and supporting evidence do not satisfy the Treasury that the missing portion has been totally destroyed"
For at least 12,000 years, humans have been getting very good at holding on to physical things.
Digital things, not so much. I'm a professional in the field, yet I've lost digital data in the past few years. Normal users who work in other fields? Lost cause.
Accidentally burning money is a very low probably event. Forgetting passwords or any type of memorized secret is the most likely default outcome, and chance only increases with time passing.
With current currencies you don't have an option, you HAVE to give your money to banks and accept its consequences, like losing privacy, risk of have it frozen, etc.
With cryptocurrencies at least you have an option, you can leave it at a custodial wallet that can manage some of the security for you or you can have a non-custodial wallet.
Yes and people quickly realized that there is an amount they don’t want to carry around. No one carries their life savings and few would even keep it in a safe in their house.
Yes, by evolving banks to solve some of the problems of lugging around lots of cash and/or stuffing it in a trunk in your house. And assuming you are known at your bank and/or can (eventually) prove your identity there, you don't have the same "lost wallet" problem being discussed here.
Money occupies physical space, so for most of history there was a pretty low cap on how much you could bring with you at once, which placed a cap on how much a single mistake could cost you.
Currency was traditionally made of precious metals which often gave them a rather high starting point of value. It also made them inflation resistant meaning the real value only grew over time. For instance in the Roman Empire an aureus [1] was worth 25 denarii (prior to inflation) and was about 2cm in size, so roughly the same size as a dime, made of pure gold. And a denarius was worth about a day's wages. So you could comfortably hold decades of wages in a small coin purse. And as inflation ravaged the Empire a single aureus gradually came to be worth thousands of denarii.
This is what transit payment cards in Japan at least do, you can tap to pay most places but there’s a cap of 20k yen you can add to your card, so there’s a cap to how much you can lose.
I love how these cards work in Japan. There’s a bunch of different operators but they all work across the country – for example, if you buy a KITACA in Sapporo, you can use it in Tokyo and Osaka and anywhere else. And of course you can use them in a bunch of places, from all the transit options to vending machines and coin lockers on stations to konbini everywhere and even some restaurants.
At which point I gained the problem of having to keep track of all of my microwallets securely, hopefully in a way that survives my phone being lost, a house fire, or my untimely death, leaving the wealth to inheritors. All while, at the same time, not ending up behind a single key that has access to all the information to those micro wallets.
Quickly you end up in a situation that either starts to look like how financial companies keep their most high risk keys, or end up outsourcing the whole thing to something that quickly starts to resemble your bank.
So ultimately it's just like cash: Fine for small amounts. Risky, but maybe livable for somewhat larger accounts, or a giant headache that will probably bite you when you start looking at lifetime savings.
For the system yes, a dropped coin eventually reenters the market and a burned bill can be reprinted again. Can't say the same about a crypto wallet. For an individual though, in both cases, a lost wallet is a lost wallet.
While an interesting difference to study, the average person is not going to care about the former case. They just don't want to keep their life savings in an asset as easy to loose as their pocket money.
If you drop your wallet in a bar, there's a chance you can recover it by returning to the bar and searching for it, by the bartender or a patron returning it to you based on the address or a number in your wallet, etc. Physical money really is not the same, even for the individual.
A $1 note being a macro scale physical object enjoys a variety of benefits such as object permanence which provide a baseline level of recoverability. Whereas a wallet key l, being a number, enjoys no such protections.
Of course you may choose to encode your wallet key on paper, metal, or stone granting it properties not unlike a note. However you have now compromised the security of your wallet as well it becomes no mere $1 note, rather it is a note that represents all or a significant fraction of your net worth.
There's no fundamental property of the monetary system that prevents transfers of arbitrary value across international borders. There's just a large number of financial regulators, border guards, etc. who will throw you in jail if you carry a big block of gold across the border or accept a large wire transfer without filling out the necessary forms. In many countries, the laws governing those forms don't yet apply to cryptocurrencies, but I'm skeptical it will remain that way forever.
That's true, and the AML laws for crypto are already becoming more strict, especially in Europe. But in practice, it will be much easier to evade those laws than it is with fiat transfers or moving physical cash/gold.
And the notion of credit has been a thing even longer than both money and banks. You don't need to carry money around for every little transaction if people know you're good for it someday in the the future.
Don't you need an idea of credit for money to work at all? You need to be able to trust that the shiny rock you give me today for my wheat will be worth anything tomorrow when I want some of your meat.
Yeah and it sucked which is why we invented better solutions.
What most bitcoin fans seem not to understand is that for the vast majority of people, transactions being reversible by authority figures is desirable.
Maybe instead of a crypto brokerage holding your wallet, there can be a "key bank" which uses those more expensive methods of attestation and you can use it for recovery if you lose your key up to once per year or something. It would be like having your key written down in a safety deposit box at a local or regional bank.
Maybe the key bank could hold your digital money as well. Then we wouldn’t need a blockchain and your transactions could be instant, free, private and reversible.
This is the same problem that you run into with secret zero and commonly discussed in context of HashiCorp Vault. At some point you need to store the unlock keys then you need another repository under RBAC to protect that repository. They say to print out the keys and store them offline on paper but how many own a Class 5 safe ?
> These safes are certified for classified use and they are safe.
The website says "10 minutes against forced entry". That's not safe.
No safe is safe against a state level actor. No safe is safe against "hit you with a crowbar until you open the safe".
Whatever secrets you have, it's better to hide them than to put them in such a conspicuous place. The only reason one should use a safe is as a plausible decoy...
Yea but you have multiple pieces of the secret to restart your Vault instance. Now you need to go to everyone’s office or home to get this secret to restore it.
I am referring to Shamir algorithm that Vault uses
Collaborative custody multisig providers have been in business for years. Recently even Block (CashApp etc) has introduced a product with this feature.
By geographically distributing your signing devices you improve both security and reliability. One of those keys can be hosted by a third party to be used for recovery, without providing them any ability to touch your funds without your involvement.
>> If the answer is "they just don't get access anymore" or "a panel of their peers attests to them", your fantasy authentication system also needs a fantasy species of sentient beings to serve as users, because it won't work for humans.
>This has been my single biggest argument against fiat currency stuff for years: the "lose your money, lose your money" thing is fundamentally incompatible with real users. Humans need to be able to recover from their mistakes.
And yet, for the very longest time, it was the default position for humans.
> This has been my single biggest argument against blockchain/cryptocurrency stuff for years: the "lose your key, lose your wallet" thing is fundamentally incompatible with real users.
This would make currency fundamentally incompatible with real users. Reality says otherwise.
Currency in the real world has many, many backups. For example, if I forgot the PIN number to a very old bank account that I later find a long lost relative recently put hundreds of thousands of dollars into when they passed away, I have other avenues to recover access. They might be annoying or require work (getting an affidavit, multiple forms of ID, etc) but it's not irrevocable in the way that a strict definition of bitcoin is.
It's a lot harder for the average person to lose 1 million dollars in cash than in Bitcoin because humans naturally understand the exchange of physical objects.
If I have a duffel bag of money, it is obvious that physical possession of the bills means I can access its value. Anything negating that possession would cost me my money. I should probably keep it away from open flames and water; but it's not going to spontaneously combust. A thief would need to physically take the money in the duffel bag for me to lose the value.
Meanwhile if I store Bitcoin on a USB drive the drive might randomly fail and I lose all my money (because I'm actually storing a key to access it) even though I still have the USB stick. The solution is to back up my key in multiple places simultaneously, which doesn't make sense to most people (how can money be in two places at once?)
If I plug the USB stick into the wrong computer, someone can steal all my money (because they can find out what the key is) without me ever losing the USB stick.
Virtually every human on Earth understands the notions of object permanence and that objects can be exchanged for other objects. This is intuitive from evolution and actual monkeys can comprehend physical currency.[1] I don't see how cryptocurrency can be on that level.
In reality I've found a lost wallet and helped return it to its owner. At least twice, actually. Both times because there was an identifying name in the wallet.
Then there's the time as a kid when we found $60 on the floor at a department store, and turned it over to lost&found. I remember it because the store had a policy that if cash hadn't been claimed for a month, then the person who turned it in got it. Which we did.
I've heard that a lot about cryptocurrency, but aren't there plenty of cryptocurrency users who have never lost their wallet and have good personal opsec?
Maybe the issue is trying to force one solution for everyone.
The issue in not trying to force one solution for everyone becomes a blocker when you intend on making some technology useful and essential to everyone, hence, no one seriously gives a damn about crypto anymore.
This has been my single biggest argument against blockchain/cryptocurrency stuff for years: the "lose your key, lose your wallet" thing is fundamentally incompatible with real users.
Humans need to be able to recover from their mistakes.