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Comment by louwrentius | Hacker News Reader

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Cryptocurrency is the only place where regular people use cryptography that they control in a way that matters enough for someone to attack it. Of course we will see mistakes being made. Covering your ears and singing "lalala crypto bad" instead of trying to learn how to make cryptography easier to use is boring.

Far more regular people use other cryptography tools and protocols like full disk encryption, TLS, end-to-end encrypted messaging, etc. All of those are secure and easy to use.

Regular people don’t need to manage private keys for those, but there are a lot of weaknesses around the Trusted Platform Module managing said key for disk encryption. The “end-to-end” encrypted messaging also hides the fact that the keys are accessible by the platform operator in most cases, whether through iCloud Backup or otherwise. This is a decent middle ground if you can completely trust your provider, but obfuscating the real mechanics of the private key is how people are fooled into believing their communication is truly private.

The truth is that it’s all good enough and all of this is valuable to people. The currency stuff has a net negative impact on our society.

In the end, societies are build on trust, as you trust your bank not to steal your money. Seems that so many people get so into the technicalities yet don’t understand the larger system.

Our current systems for verifying identity are incredibly vulnerable as demonstrated by the huge number of identity theft scams. Pretending that it works well is laughable. Cryptographic signatures have their own issues but they present a way forward. Cryptocurrency is the domain where they are used on a wide scale. Ignoring this because you have an ingroup attachment to bashing cryptocurrency is silly. Sort of like if you willfully ignored the innovation of networked electronic trading systems in the '70s because you thought Wall Street is a scam.

It’s funny that the ransomware attacks are 100% enabled by crypto. And aside from some bros gambling with crypto, cryptocurrency means nothing to 99.999% of the world population. Speaking of laughable.

Cryptocurrency only makes sense if you don’t understand society.

Crypto will never ever be mainstream because it doesn’t solve a problem normal people have.

It will be forever relegated to pump & dump schemes.

Crypto is for people who don’t understand how societies work.

Clearly you didn't RTFA. This mistake was on Canonical / is due to a lack of vetting in the Ubuntu app store.

I don't know jack about crypto but surely we shouldn't expect a distro provider to be vetting financial instruments?

There was malware in the Snap store! This could've just as easily been a password manager and wiped out the guy's bank account.

There's malware everywhere

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