Wallets and security, what happens when cryptocurrency becomes truly mainstream ?
So, sometime in the near future I do believe that cryptocurrency will become a mainstay of society and an accepted way to transact in many nations.
But what does this mean for holding your own private keys at home ? Criminals will know that it is an item that most people have. It is not inconceivable that armed robberies could take place and they demand access to your private keys. Right now that is just unlikely to happen because a tiny minority even holds cryptocurrency.
Besides for splitting your funds up into multiple wallets (which is tedious and the mass market won't behave this way)... I see it going one of two ways. Either people will be willing to trust their private keys with a centralised cryptocurrency vault of some kind, something infinitely more secure than our current exchanges. Or, it will be common practise to lock your funds in smart contracts with various rules in place. Such as any withdrawal of say more than 10 coin is subject to a 1 week waiting period - and it can also be cancelled by a secondary party that you trust. These smart contracts would need to be built into wallets in a simple enough manner so that the average user can find value in it.
So, I am curious to know how do you feel this will play out ? Will we be forced to eventually trust some centralised party ? Or, will we be able to remain in control with smart contracts ?
In a fully crypto world (or atleast a mainstream one) where crypto fraud and theft is on such a massive scale I believe we will start to see a rift; some people (less educated on the matter) will turn to central banks and government to hold onto their cryptos but for the rest of us we have to deal with the fact that we can't put all of our s in one basket;
When cryptos become mainstream we will have payment functionalities built in by Apple in iOS and the Wallet app. Only then will it truly be mainstream.
So you are saying that you would be willing to trust apple with your private keys?
Mass population doesn't even want to think about that stuff and most definately people don't want to hold 5 to 10 different wallets with each their own functionality and design.
All of that stuff is holding the crypto stuff from getting anywhere close to becoming mainstream.
Exactly thats the problem; decentralization will eventually lead to centralization
I believe it will. It must. Nobody really asked for decentralization... people asked for lower fees and faster transactions. We wanted to shake up the banking world...
Well. It's happening. But eventually things need to become centralized again in order to mature the space and reach mass adoption.
when we do reach mass adoption, and we do become centralized, what do we do if there is another Mt Gox; say Apple's IPay Crypto Wallet gets hacked 85 Billion lost ; can we just sit here and take that. Isnt that the very thing that we have tried to escape?
then some Mt Gox happens ppl "expose the truth" and now we're back to square one all over again | cryptos in their current state arent fit for mass market use
Yup, two biggest obstacles right now are scaling and security/ease of use for the average user. I really do feel that a viable option will be easy to use smart contracts that can minimise losses that are deployed by the wallets themselves. That way we can retain decentralised ways of working. Although the average joe will want recovery options for when they lose their private keys.. Not sure how that can be implemented. I know this is one of the things EOS will be doing though but their solution is kinda centralised (correct me if i am wrong please)
EOS will be like ethereum using smart contracts probably along with the EOS token
Yeah but one of their selling points is they are building options for account recovery. And claimed scalability of over a million transactions a second. Exactly the sort of thing mainstream adoption requires. Of course these are huge promises to make so we will have to wait and see...
Exactly. We are nowhere near mass adoption.
honestly I don't see a world with only cryptos anytime soon
Banks will not let that happen anyway. Not within 10 to 20 years at least.
In the meantime that's why Ripple has a real use case working with banks. And it's a pretty big use case as well.
I doubt fiat will cease to exist during our lifetime. We are nowhere near mass adoption now but in 10-15 years crypto can become mainstream and a popular method of payments, but it will be along other fiat currencies. Some centralization will take place for sure at that point though.