this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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Most in the crypto industry wouldn’t consider a hardware key that shares metal with an internet connected device to be a very safe hardware key though. Of course when your hardware key such as a ledger or yubikey is plugged into your computer, now it’s also sharing metal.
I think the industry needs a term to differentiate between all these categories of hardware wallets.
The best is an airgapped hardware wallet such as Keystone.
Oh, yes. Let’s listen to the crypto industry, that famous industry with no security breaches or frauds. We might as well ask for site design advice from restaurants that don’t put their hours or menu somewhere prominent on their site.
I'd like to think there's a difference between the cryptography industry and the cryptocurrency industry
That's probably what pisses me off the most about the cryptocurrency world. They somehow appropriated the word "crypto" to mean their internet money, instead of the meaning it had tracing back to World War 2, if not earlier.
The crypto industry has been perfecting key security for 10 years with huge financial incentive to do so.
Hacks and grifters are in every industry. It’s unrelated to a conversation about passkeys.
Let me know when the crypto community gets key security perfected so I can buy some glorified airplane points from a guy named catfucker88 or whatever. In the mean time, I’ll use normal cryptography libraries and leave the headassery to others.
Who hurt you?
A few extremely beautiful women but they got consent beforehand and I hold no grudges. If I’m honest with myself, I mostly enjoyed it.
Did they scare you from crypto? Perhaps they sold all of your assets and hid the proceeds in crypto?
I’m genuinely curious why the disdain for a censorship resistant, global state machine.
Is it selective? Like are newer high speed L1 ledgers like sui and solana hated by you just as much? Do you just hate memecoins?
No, I’m just a Democratic socialist software engineer with an economics background. I’m pretty much exactly who would think blockchain is unimpressive tech and would be suspicious of the libertarian utopian economic theories behind it.
A lot of it is that I see most of the mistakes of the 1800’s American free banking era being repeated. There’s a lot of intuitive-seeming economic ideas that have been discredited by real world events. Most crypto enthusiasts buy into one, whether it’s goldbugism or Austrian economics or whatever. Most of the economic theories behind bitcoin were things we usually learned the hard way are not effective.
And so, of course it’s ripe with scams. Sometimes, what sounds like common sense is actually just some mistake humans make every time we forget history. I was originally hopeful the tech would make things like international remittances cost-free (and disrupt Western Union or whatever) but it really hasn’t.
And, like it or not, we have a carbon budget. Off-grid Bitcoin mining using solar or wind doesn’t bother me. Have fun with that. But if any part of it requires more burning of coal or natural gas, it’s a net negative to humanity even before we get into money laundering and scams.
I think I have considered the merits — you mentioned avoiding government oppression — and still think the negative outweigh the positives. But I sometimes smoke so what do I know?
It’s such a huge industry which often gets attention due to its scams and ponzis. That part bugs me. It’s like getting in a tizzy about the SWIFT network because people gamble in Las Vegas.
The stablecoin market and surrounding tools for remittance, lending, settlement, etc are quite different from influencers pumping $CUMROCKET or whatever nonsense they come up with.
Being able to test and observe the crazy economic theories you’ve mentioned is kinda fascinating. And the game theory involved.
Permissionless, programmable, globally synchronized ledgers bring new trustless value transfer capabilities which certainly shouldn’t be completely written off because of some grifters or economic idiots.
And in the context of this conversation, gathering some ideas and lessons learned from an industry using keypairs with retail consumers to protect trillions in value is certainly worth consideration.
I’m genuinely hopeful it becomes something. Sometimes, after a bubble bursts, people find out the true upside. Like when the dot com bubble burst, there was suddenly all this super cheap infrastructure and bandwidth. That allowed a lot of innovation.
The bubble bursts every 4 years.
Bitcoin dies constantly
Wtf are you talking about
If the key is in the same device that's being used to access a protected resource over the network, the thing can be potentially be hacked and the key retrieved.
That's why there are solutions were the key never leaves a secure hardware device, such as challenge-response authentication were a bank card's smartchip is used to generate responses to the challenges (with the key never being outside the card) or keydongles that show a variable code, depending on time.
This is actually pretty old tech.